Personal project
A love letter to the Japanese photo booth.
Purikura machines are a staple of Japanese arcades — squeeze into a booth, take a flurry of photos, and walk away with a sticker strip covered in sparkles and doodles. I wanted to recreate this energy as a mobile-first digital photo strip app.
Role
Designer and ~Vibe Coder~
Tech stack
Built with Claude Code (Next.js, Firebase Firestore / Storage, Vercel)
TIMELINE
~2 weeks (2026)
Add stickers
Decorate your strip with stickers! Drag, pinch, and rotate to arrange stickers.
Recrop photos and add frames
Adjust your photo crop and apply decorative frames.
Change theme
Switch themes to instantly restyle your strip's palette and stickers.
Reflections
Turns out, building things is really fun.
I designed and built kirakira as a progressive web app (PWA), directing the vision and making decisions while using AI as my collaborator. Besides learning some technical skills such as how storage, deployment, and database reads actually work, I got a crash course in real product decisions: How should sharing work? When is a bug worth fixing versus shipping the next feature? How much polish is enough before something is ready to exist in the world? Working through these end to end gave me a new appreciation for the full arc of building a product.
Favorite part: Curating three distinct themes, each with its own aesthetic and sticker set. So fun!
Least favorite part: Burning through 3 sessions of Claude usage to fix the photo recropping bug 🫠
