Creative AI
Artificial intelligence in Art
Campoetry is a digital poetry experience that transforms everyday photos into expressive and beautiful poems.
It began as an evolution of an earlier prototype, Digital Poetry Camera (v1), reimagining how people interact with moments, memory, and meaning through their phones. What started
as a personal experiment in combining two things I love, photography and poetry, became
a fully realized product that I designed, built, and shipped.
Inspired by the physical Poetry Camera by Ryan Mather and Kelin Zhang, I wanted to explore how a digital interface could capture emotion, translate visuals into text, and create a magical, personal moment for users.
This project allowed me to practice interactive design, creative AI prompting, and the challenge of converting photography into expressive written art, all within a clean, minimal, and user-friendly flow.
Additionally, by digitalizing this hardware product, I made it accessible to a wider audience who may not have access to the original, which is currently sold out.
Homepage for campoetry
I've always written poetry. And like most people with a phone, I photograph my world constantly, the light through a window, an empty road, the texture of something ordinary. What I kept wishing for was a bridge between those two things: a way to look at a photograph and immediately find the words it was holding.
Hompage for Digital Poetry Camera (v1)
The first version was called Digital Poetry Camera. It worked. You could snap a photo
and get a poem. But looking at it honestly, it felt mechanical. Techy. The kind of thing that announces itself as a tool rather than an experience. It got the job done, but it didn't feel like poetry and that mattered to me.
I knew what I wanted to build instead: something that sat between whimsical and simple. Something that felt soft and a little magical, the way a good poem does. That gap between
V1 and that vision became the design brief for Campoetry.
The creation of Campoetry started with an identity shift. I wanted this product I had poured myself into to be more of an experience than a tool that is very impersonal. I decided to give it a personal name and not just Digital Poetry Camera. After a lot of back and forth, I eventually settled on Campoetry, which literally is Camera + Poetry = Campoetry.
From there, I started working on the entire brand identity, the logo, the typography, the palette. Each decision was reaffirming the experience I wanted to build.
I wanted it to be somewhere between whimsical and simple.
How It Works
My goal was to keep the interface simple, warm, and accessible. This tool is for anyone who enjoys art, poetry, and creative play, so the experience needed to feel effortless.
UX decisions I made
Centralised layout: Everything is centered to mimic the feeling of looking through a camera frame.
Minimal controls: Only essential actions are visible so users don’t feel overwhelmed.
Instant feedback: Poems generate immediately after a photo is taken or uploaded, creating a “magic moment.”
Polaroid-style output: The result looks like a physical memory you can keep or share.
Colour options: Users can adjust poem colours to express mood and creativity.
The Interface to download the poem generated (It's still a work in process)
I came across the original Poetry Camera (https://poetry.camera/) while searching for inspiration online, and I was immediately fascinated by the idea of a camera that prints poetry. The physical product was sold out, and I wondered what it would look like if it existed as a digital experience instead.
I’ve always loved poetry and images, and the idea of merging both in real time felt magical.
The gap I saw:
The original product was limited to people who could buy the physical device. I wanted to bring that experience into the digital world so anyone, anywhere, could use it instantly.
Questions I was exploring:
How far can AI go in transforming everyday scenery into poetry?
Can poetry be generated in a way that feels personal and meaningful?
How do we bring a physical interaction into a digital experience without losing its charm?
This project was an experiment in curiosity to see what would happen if everyday scenes could become poems in seconds.
In my initial designs, the images were stretching, displayed at inconsistent sizes, and portions were being cropped unexpectedly.
Key UX Decisions
The Polaroid (from V1)
When you get your poem, you can download it as a polaroid, your photo and the words it made, held in one image. The idea was simple: people want to keep beautiful moments. A block of text disappears. A polaroid stays.
2.The Poem-Only Download (added in V2)
Not everyone wanted the photo attached. Some people just wanted the words — to print them quietly, share them somewhere, keep them for themselves. So V2 added the option to download the poem on its own. Same feeling, different form.
After many iterations and prompts, I got the Ideal polaroid design
What I Learned
1. How to translate a physical experience into a digital one
Recreating the charm of a real poetry camera taught me how to design digital interactions that still feel emotional, warm, and human. I learned to focus on timing, simplicity, and small details that preserve the “magic” of the original idea.
2. Accessibility through digitalisation
Turning a physical product into a web-based tool showed me how accessibility goes beyond fonts and colours, it’s also about removing barriers. By digitising the experience, anyone from any location can use it instantly without needing a device, shipping, or cost. This taught me how digital tools can democratise creativity.
3. The importance of structured prompt design
Generating meaningful poems wasn’t just about using GPT, it required thoughtful prompt engineering. I learned to break prompts into batches, refine them for consistency, and design logic that ties the image to the poem in a way that feels intentional, not random.
Future Improvements
1. Audio poems for everyone: The ability to listen to your generated poem and download it as audio. This is a feature for non-sighted individuals, however, sighted users are also included. Sometimes a poem deserves to be heard, not just read. And for users who can't see, it opens the door to the full experience entirely.
2. Design refinement: The UI still has room to grow. Testing across devices, tightening the layout, making sure it feels as considered on a small screen as it does in the designer's eye.
Tolu Ali