Moonlights #177 (Sunflower Edition)

Sunflower: A quiet revolution against the chaos of email.

Jun 20, 2025

I’ve missed the last few weeks of Moonlights - and that’s because mostttt of the free time I had was devoted to designing and building the Sunflower website, which we recently launched to the world!

For this edition, I want to share some of the work I did, and also, introduce all of you to Sunflower - a quiet revolution against the chaos of email.

Let’s dive in.

PS - next week we’ll get back to the regular scheduled Moonlights you’re used to seeing.

Quick backstory

I still remember peeling the plastic off my first iPhone. The screen lit up and suddenly an entire playground lived inside that little pane of glass. I was hooked.

Not long after, I stumbled onto Path, a social network for no more than fifty connections (based on the Dunbar’s number research). Every icon and interaction felt hand-stitched, a pocket-sized bit of luxury compared with the other apps I had used.

At the time, I was teaching myself design, and nights turned into quiet marathons - screenshots of everything they built dumped into Photoshop, every curve traced and retraced until I learned how to recreate each texture, button, and gradient. Those late-night sessions became my unofficial design school and eventually opened the door for me to be the lead designer at my first company.

That was almost fifteen years ago.

What is Sunflower?

A little over a year ago, my two co-founders and I decided we wanted to tackle one of the oldest and hardest problems on the internet: email. I’ve tried every shiny new inbox that’s popped up, and there have been some great ones over the years: Sparrow, Mailbox, Astro, and a bunch more. Yet those apps either shut down or got acquired, and I always drifted back to the defaults, still drowning in the same flood. Only now it’s worse than ever.

I’d been sketching and jotting email ideas down for years, but the timing never felt right. Then AI exploded. New tools, new ideas, fresh hope.

We talked with a ton of people. Everyone bends email to their own workflow, but the eye-roll when the topic comes up is universal. Most of what lands in our inbox is noise, so our mission is simple: clear the junk, surface the signal, and hand you an email experience that feels like it was built just for you.

Our tagline → An inbox that works, for you.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be opening the doors up to our first wave of Alpha users. If you want to join, sign up for the waitlist here → https://sunflower.me/.

Look 🌻

I designed and built the website in Framer and had so much fun telling our story.

Here are a few designs that did not make the cut:

And here are some that did make it!

Watch 🪼

One of my favorite things I got to make for this part of the project was the unfolding of the a ethereal digital flower at the bottom of the footer. Here’s the video.

From Me 🎒

Building Sunflower has been a labor of love and I can’t wait until people start using the app. We have so many exciting things on the horizon and I’m going to start sharing more of the experimental work here.

If I could ask all of you one favor → if you know anyone that may like Sunflower, send them to our website and tell them to sign up for the waitlist.

Thank you for following along!