Directive
Ebb is an anti-calendar. Every calendar you've used optimizes for output — more scheduled, more done. Ebb rejects that, working around your real obligations — meetings, deadlines, events — and actively checking in to pull you back offline, into rest, art, reading: the things that make you human.
This is for anyone sick of algorithms, overloaded negativity, and the constant pressure to be productive — myself included. Ebb is a calm space to rest, notice, and schedule: a counterweight to all of that, not another tool trying to optimize you.
Jobs to Be Done
With the problem and who it's for locked, I asked myself honestly what Ebb actually has to do — not at the feature level, but what I wanted it to address for its user. What I rooted myself in was the overarching theme of guiding someone back offline: not just blocking time, but gauging energy levels and actively monitoring how the user feels against what they have scheduled. I narrowed the jobs down to three to start.
Three jobs survived that process:
Scope
My goal with Ebb is to encourage people not to use it, get offline, and try to decompress from their screens. That takes a ton of effort, and in a short time-box of two days, I scoped the project down to a really slick, efficient onboarding flow.
The purpose is to have you connect your actual calendar — starting with one — and enter your energy mood. What's real in this build: the energy check-in, protected time blocks sitting on equal footing with real meetings, and one real intervention when a meeting lands against a low-energy read.
Early Exploration
Before any color or type decisions were made, I locked the onboarding as plain, achromatic wireframes — layout and sequence only. The wireframes and flow were meant as a starting point to pressure test the idea, going back and forth to discuss ways in which a user may enter their information and ease into the app.
Visual System
Plumb is the only mark, but it's one piece of a larger system — a dark, restrained palette; type with a clear division of labor between headlines, body copy, and structural metadata; and a small set of components built directly from the onboarding flow and Today screen.
Plumb — Mark
Plumb — Loading Mark
Color — Night
Palette in Night
Palette in Day
The Flow
Welcome, calendar connection, energy check-in, and the Today screen it produces — the same code as the interactive prototype at the top of this page, just laid flat so you can see the whole sequence at once.
Welcome
Calendar Connection
Calendar Connected
Energy Check-in
Loading
Today
What's next: a real calendar connection in place of the seeded one, and a better read on mood than a single check-in slider — plus figuring out what actually gets someone to put the phone down during a protected block, not just block the time for it.
Built by Frank.