Desbook
Somewhere to put the design links and prompts you keep losing.
- Year
- 2026
- Type
- Web app
- Status
- Live
- Built with
- React, Vite, Supabase, Cloudflare
About
Desbook — short for Design Book — is a library for the two things designers collect and then lose: links and prompts. Tools, component libraries, fonts, references, the thing you saw once and wanted to try later. And the prompts you rewrite from scratch every time, because you never saved the good one.
It doesn't start empty. A new library arrives with around fifty hand-picked design links already sorted into categories — inspiration, studios, type, components, motion, tools — so it's useful before you've added anything of your own.
What it does
Every link gets a category, a note in your own words, and a favorite. The note is the part that earns its keep: six months later, good for grain textures is what you'll go looking for, not the name of the site.
Search is fuzzy and instant, and ⌘K opens a command palette that jumps straight to any link, prompt or category without touching the mouse.
Four views do the filing you'd never do yourself. All links is everything. Favorites is the short list you actually reuse. Most used ranks by how often you open things. And Forgotten is the honest one — anything you've never opened, or haven't touched in a month. It's the view that tells you whether you're collecting tools or using them.
Grid view pulls each site's own preview image, so the library looks like the work instead of a list of addresses. Prompts sit in their own pinned category with a title, a description and the full text, one click to copy.
Getting your stuff in, and out
Point Desbook at a browser bookmarks export and it files them by folder, skipping anything you've already saved. It compares addresses properly, so tracking parameters, www and trailing slashes don't quietly become duplicates.
You can export the whole library back out as JSON whenever you feel like it. It's your collection, not a hostage.
Right now the library lives in the browser you use it in. No account, no sign-up, nothing to confirm by email — you open it and start. Which also makes that export your backup, and the way you carry a library to another machine.
Underneath: dark and light, drag to reorder categories, a trash you can restore from, and ⌘Z on anything you delete or move.
Why I built it
I kept all of it in a Google Doc. Design tools, libraries, anything worth coming back to, pasted into one document that got longer every month. Then AI tools started arriving faster than anyone could keep up with, and each one came with prompts worth saving too. The doc stopped being a list and became a pile.
Browser bookmarks weren't the answer either. They're built for pages you return to, not for a collection you browse. I wanted something closer to a shelf — things in categories, quick to scan, quick to add to without thinking about it. So I built it.
What's next
Accounts, so a library stops being tied to one browser and follows you to whatever machine you're on. The whole thing is already built for it — it's switched off on purpose while Desbook is being tested, so nobody needs an inbox to try it.
A browser extension, so saving a link takes one click from the page you're already on instead of a trip back to the dashboard. That's the piece that turns Desbook from somewhere you tidy into somewhere you save.
Sharing: hand someone a link to your library to look through, or let them pull your links straight into their own. Team libraries are the same idea pointed inward — one shared set for everyone working together, instead of six private versions of the same list.
And after that, workflows — how people actually use these tools together, not just what the tools are. The plan is for Desbook to be somewhere you learn from other designers' setups, not only somewhere you keep your own.