Aska

A design-forward visual workspace and cloud archive for digital creatives.

Who it's for

Designers, art directors, UI/UX engineers, and creative researchers who save visual references from across the web and need a single, high-fidelity repository to keep them organized and findable.

The problem

Creative tools are optimized for text. Designers save references via browser bookmarks (which break), social media saves (which get buried), and local desktop folders (which are a mess). There's no unified place that treats visual content as a first-class asset and preserves it permanently.

What it does

Aska ingests content from multiple streams — image uploads, social media links (X, Instagram), and article URLs — and preserves them as durable visual assets. The Inbox renders the archive as a masonry grid, while collections provide an infinite spatial canvas for composing moodboards.

Core concepts

• Workspaces — Tenant-level containers. Personal vaults, studio spaces, etc. Completely isolated.
• Collections — Independent infinite canvases within a workspace. Each collection is a spatial moodboard such as "Acme Rebrand", "Typography Inspo", or "Spring Palette". This is the main organizational unit.
• Folders — First-class objects on a collection canvas that open nested canvases. Folder placement is independent from the placement of its contents.
• Assets — The polymorphic card that unifies everything: image uploads, social captures, article bookmarks, and notes.

Ingest

• Image upload — Drag and drop into the Inbox or at a chosen collection canvas position. Stored in cloud storage, full resolution preserved.
• X / Instagram capture — Paste a link. Aska extracts the media, text context, and author. Mirrored safely so deletion of the original post doesn't lose the reference.
• Article bookmark — Paste a URL. Aska extracts readable content and meta info, generates a preview card, and indexes the text for search.
• Notes — Quick text snippets with color labels for raw ideas.

Surface & find

• Color search — Extracted image palettes provide ranked retrieval in the Inbox and current collection/folder canvas. It preserves authored canvas positions and Inbox ordering. See how it works.
• Smart collections — Saved queries (by color, type, tags) that auto-populate.
• Full-text search across article content and notes.

Architecture

Aska is multi-tenant from day one. Every asset, collection, and folder belongs to a workspace and has creator metadata. Collections contain a spatial tree of nodes: image and note assets are leaf nodes, while folders organize nested content. Each placement has an authored position on its collection or folder canvas. Folders are not assets.

The application consists of a React/Vite client, a Bun/Hono API backed by Postgres and Drizzle, plus AWS Lambda image workers that process S3 uploads asynchronously through independent SQS queues. Collection and folder badges show descendant asset counts: images and notes count, folders do not. The client uses XYFlow for collection canvas rendering and interaction while Aska's API remains the source of truth for node identity, hierarchy, and position.

See the engineering docs for a codebase map, architecture, data model, backend conventions, operations, and contribution workflow.

The real-AWS development, deployment, stage, secret, and React/Vite hosting workflow is documented in SST_DEPLOYMENT.md.

Development

Each package is independently installed and run with Bun:

cd client && bun install && bun run dev
cd server && bun install && bun run dev
cd services/image-variants && bun install
cd services/image-palette && bun install

For normal end-to-end development, use real AWS S3 and SQS through SST instead of the isolated package commands; see SST_DEPLOYMENT.md.

Run the full package-local quality suite with bun run lint, bun run typecheck, bun run format, and bun run test. The same commands run in CI. Running bun install at the repository root installs the tracked pre-commit hook, which formats staged source files with Oxfmt.