Shelf for creative directors
Build a memory of your visual taste.
Years of taste live in fragments. A campaign from five years ago. A photographer someone mentioned once. A strange packaging detail. An interface. A title treatment. A film frame.
Shelf turns years of collecting into something you can return to.
Grouped by
- Monochrome and type-led
- Warm film photography
- Packaging detail
- Title sequences
- Editorial layout
- Hand-drawn marks
The problem
Your references get more valuable with time.
The problem is that most archives become less usable as they grow. A hundred references is a resource. Nine thousand is a warehouse with no aisles.
Shelf is designed for the opposite: the more you keep, the more there is to find, because finding doesn't depend on how you filed it.
Why you kept it, not just that you kept it.
A reference is useless when you can't remember what you admired about it. Shelf holds the visible characteristics alongside your own note.
Monochrome, one face, type crossing the eyes.
A direction is a set of references with reasons.
When someone asks where a direction came from, the honest answer is a sequence. Shelf keeps the sequence intact.
- 01 · SeedOne packaging detailKept without a project
- 02 · ThenTwo photographers with the same lightFound separately
- 03 · ThenA title sequence that held too longScreenshot, timestamped
- 04 · ThenYour note on restraintFour lines
- 05 · DirectionThe deck that came out of itWith its sources still attached
Find the reference you can only describe.
Shelf matches on visible characteristics, text inside the image, meaning and time. It does not judge taste, and it will not pretend to.
What you remember
Uncoated stock. Just an impression, no ink.
Clues Shelf can use
- Visual characteristics: near-white, minimal contrast, one impressed mark
- Meaning: packaging rather than print advertising
- Context: kept during the drinks pitch
- Visual similarity
- Very low contrast with a single impressed form.
- Semantic meaning
- Read as packaging, not as a poster.
- Related project
- Kept during that pitch, with four others.
Kept nearby
- Uncoated stock, one colour · Same group
- Drawn monogram · Same pitch
An archive of taste is competitive information.
Your archive shows what you're pitching, who you're considering, and where a campaign is heading before anyone has signed anything.
Shelf keeps it on your Mac, reads it locally and indexes it locally. Optional features that call an external model are marked and disabled unless you turn them on.
Taste compounds when memory does.
Keep a memory of what good looks like to you.
Years of references, findable by what you remember about them.
Keep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.