ABOUT SQUINT
Squint is a free arcade of five-minute games that train a designer's instincts. Great designers rely on a trained eye — for proportion, spacing, colour and ideas — and like any skill, that eye improves with deliberate practice and honest feedback. Squint turns that practice into short, replayable games.
Every round ends with a teach-back: the correct answer overlaid on yours, the error measured, and the design principle behind the miss. Progress is tracked locally so you can watch your accuracy trend over time, rounds adapt toward whatever you're worst at, and the Daily Warm-Up chains everything into a five-minute ritual before the real work begins.
THE GAMES
- Eyeball It · trains visual accuracy — the trained eye
- Bisect lines, centre dots, judge angles, find thirds and the golden section purely by eye. Every round reveals the truth with a design-spec redline showing your error, plus the principle behind the miss (like why optical centre sits above geometric centre).
- Kern Combat · trains typographic craft — letter spacing
- Drag letters until every gap feels even, then see the font's true kerning ghosted under your attempt with per-gap deviation marks. Teaches the optical rules: open pairs nest, rounds tuck in, straight stems need air.
- Colour Forge · trains colour perception
- Mix hue, saturation and lightness to match a target — sometimes from memory, sometimes finding the complement. Scored perceptually (CIEDE2000) with a signed per-channel breakdown of which way your eye lies.
- Thirty Circles · trains divergent thinking
- The classic creativity sprint: thirty circles, three minutes, a different thing in each. Draw with your webcam-tracked hand or a mouse; end with a reflection on fluency, flexibility and originality, and go again with a self-imposed constraint.
- Hand Tetris · trains spatial planning and hand–eye coordination
- Tetris steered entirely by hand gestures through your webcam — slide to steer, pinch to rotate, dip to drop. All tracking runs on-device.
QUESTIONS
Is Squint free?
Yes. Squint is completely free, runs in your browser, and needs no account. Enter a player tag if you want your scores on the leaderboards; otherwise everything is saved locally on your device.
Does my camera footage leave my device?
No. The hand-tracked games (Hand Tetris and Thirty Circles) run MediaPipe hand tracking entirely on-device in your browser via WebAssembly. Video frames are never uploaded anywhere — the only network calls are fetching the model files and, if you opt in, submitting your name and score to the leaderboard.
Who is Squint for?
Designers, illustrators, typographers, art directors, students — anyone whose work depends on a trained eye. The games train visual judgement skills that transfer directly to design work: spotting a mis-centred element, uneven letter spacing, or an off colour.
How long does a session take?
About five minutes. Each game is a short session of quick rounds, and the Daily Warm-Up chains one round of every game into a single five-minute ritual with streak tracking.
What is the Thirty Circles exercise?
Thirty Circles is a classic divergent-thinking warm-up popularised by Bob McKim at Stanford and by IDEO: turn a page of thirty identical circles into thirty different recognisable things against a three-minute clock. It trains fluency (how many ideas), flexibility (how varied) and originality — the three dimensions of divergent thinking.
How does Squint score colour matching?
Colour Forge scores your mix against the target using CIEDE2000, the industry-standard perceptual colour-difference formula, computed in CIE Lab space. That means the score reflects how different the colours look to a human eye, not just how far apart the RGB numbers are — and the per-channel breakdown tells you whether you missed on hue, saturation or lightness.
How does the kerning game know the correct spacing?
Kern Combat measures the typeface's own kerned metrics in your browser and uses them as the target. You are graded against the spacing the type designer actually built into the font, expressed as a percentage accuracy per gap.