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 a fresh set of four games into a five-minute ritual before the real work begins. The interface itself is built in Focalism, a design language we invented where hierarchy is focus.

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 in 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.

Contrast Call · trains contrast judgement, reading legibility by eye

A colour pair is shown as real text; you place your call on a logarithmic rail running 1:1 to 21:1, with the WCAG thresholds marked. The true ratio is then revealed along with whether it passes AA or AAA. Rounds rotate through greyscale, warm and cool hues, clashing opposites, pairs straddling 4.5:1, and the compressed ends of the scale, each targeting a specific way the eye misreads contrast.

Double Take · trains the critical eye, spotting what's off

Two renderings of a real interface (a profile, a product listing, a player, a metric tile, a notification) sit side by side, and exactly one carries a single deliberate flaw: a broken alignment, an uneven gap, a weak size step, text under 4.5:1, a stray corner radius, lopsided padding, an off-centre icon, a mis-grouped label, an odd-sized sibling. Pick the clean one; the flaw is then named and measured, with the principle behind it. The flaws get subtler as the session goes on.

Steady Hand · trains hand control, tracing a line you can see

A Bézier curve is drawn on the artboard and you trace it in a single stroke, starting at the marker. Deviation and coverage are scored separately, so a confident inch doesn't pass as a finished curve, and the reveal distinguishes drifting off a consistent line from an unsteady one. The curve types (arc, S-curve, tight radius, long sweep, hook and wave) each break a different part of hand control.

Cutout · trains boolean thinking, how shapes combine

Two overlapping shapes are shown alongside the silhouette one boolean operation produced; you name the operation. Union, intersect and exclude are there, and so are both subtractions: A minus B is a different shape from B minus A, and telling them apart is the part people actually get wrong. A wrong answer shows what your operation would have made, next to what was asked for.

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