THE SHAPE OF IDEAS
The Shape of Ideas is a tool that gathers your notes into clusters of connected ideas. You can drop thoughts into a blank space, and it automatically groups the ones that belong together.
Each cluster shows you a bigger bubble of related ideas, turning scattered notes into a clear picture of how your thoughts connect.
The Shape of Ideas began as a personal exploration of making sense of scattered notes. I keep thoughts across sticky notes, my phone, Notion, and journals, and wanted one place to visualize them. Something closer to how they look in my head.
I gathered about five years of notes, including scans from old journals and sticky notes, and dropped them into the platform. The system grouped notes into clusters that highlighted recurring concepts, making it easy to connect my ongoing projects to notes I had written years ago.
It uses text embeddings to turn ideas into vectors and measure similarity; K-Means then clusters related ideas automatically. The interface is vanilla JS + D3.js (HTML/CSS), served by Deno + Oak, with PDF.js for document parsing and Deno KV for storage.
The Shape of Ideas is now a public tool anyone can use. Try it here
Tools Used:
Deno + Oak
OpenAI APIs (text-embedding-3-small + gpt-4o)
Custom K-Means clustering
D3.js
HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS
PDF.js
Deno KV
Deno + Oak
OpenAI APIs (text-embedding-3-small + gpt-4o)
Custom K-Means clustering
D3.js
HTML, CSS, Vanilla JS
PDF.js
Deno KV