Water of Life — Demo Iterations Round 2 — March 21, 2026
3
Icon Approaches Tried
1
Domain Pivot
5
Commitments Made
Session Theme
Second round of demo-driven iteration — print card refinement, domain pivot from waterlife.supply to wateroflife.supply, Tagalog integration, content updates, and converging on text-first design over failed icon approaches.
What Went Well
Text-based labels (Hydration / Heart Function / Muscle Recovery) replaced failed SVG/PNG icons — cleaner, more readable, instantly understandable.
Vertical stacked mineral rows work better than horizontal layout on both card formats — consistent, scannable.
Domain pivot from waterlife.supply to wateroflife.supply was clean — refactored all files, DNS, QR code, deploy config in one pass.
Tagalog integration — "Buhay na tubig" (Water of life) matches the domain name perfectly, adds cultural depth.
Print card design converged on a clean layout: benefit word big, mineral name small with underline, left-aligned centered ingredient block.
Eggs added to food sections (story + the-water) — quick content update, no friction.
"FUCK THIS SHIT!" text updated to match Joey's authentic voice — rawer, more honest.
What Could Be Better
Too many iteration cycles on print card icons — SVG freehand, then PNG via Pillow, then back to SVG, then finally text labels.
Root cause: Should have started with text. When icons fail once, pivot immediately.
Portrait card went through a bad bullets phase — diverged from landscape approach.
Root cause: Both cards should stay in sync from the start, not evolve independently.
Spacing/overflow issues on both cards required multiple rounds of tweaking.
Root cause: Need to design content-first — list all content, measure total height, then set font sizes.
Old waterlife.supply directory couldn't be renamed (device busy) — had to copy instead, leaving orphan directory.
Root cause: Windows file locking. Copy-then-clean is the safer pattern.
Sari-sari cost estimate added then removed — wasted a cycle.
Root cause: Content additions should be validated with the user before implementing.
What We Commit To
When icons fail once, pivot to text immediately — don't try 3 different icon rendering approaches.
Keep both print cards in sync from the start — changes to one should be reflected in the other immediately.
Design print cards content-first: list all content, measure total height, then set font sizes — not the other way around.
Validate content additions (like pricing) with the user before implementing.
When refactoring names/domains, use a single find-replace pass across all files rather than file-by-file.