PixelCollab: Real-Time Collaborative Whiteboard
PixelCollab is a multiplayer whiteboard built for fast visual collaboration. Users can create a room, share a link instantly, and draw together on a live synced canvas with presence indicators, chat, color tools, and a clean focus-first workspace.
Problem
Most collaborative whiteboards feel noisy long before they feel useful. I wanted to explore a simpler starting point: create a room, invite someone instantly, and start drawing without navigating a dense control surface.
Approach
PixelCollab is designed around immediacy. The product flow aims to keep the first meaningful action only a few seconds away:
- create a room
- share the link
- start drawing together with visible presence
The interface stays intentionally restrained so the canvas remains the primary workspace.
What this project shows
This project is less about enterprise feature depth and more about interaction quality. It shows how I approach realtime collaboration problems through product structure, clarity, and low-friction UX.
Next direction
The next step for this line of work is to deepen the engineering story around it: stronger state persistence, clearer concurrency boundaries, and a richer case study around realtime system trade-offs.
- Role
- Frontend product design, realtime collaboration UX, and interaction polish
- Period
- 2026
- Status
- live
Stack
- React
- TypeScript
- Canvas UI
- Realtime sync
- Presence indicators
Signals
- Share-a-link room creation keeps collaboration friction low from the first action
- The canvas, chat, and presence states are designed to stay readable in one workspace
- Minimal UI treatment keeps the product focused on flow instead of dashboard clutter
Highlights
- Built around immediate collaboration instead of heavy onboarding
- Combined visual drawing, participant awareness, and lightweight communication in a single surface
- Treated motion and layout restraint as part of the product experience, not decoration