Designers need an Undo button too — introducing REFLO

Hello, I’m 모하니, and I’m building REFLO.

This is the first post on this blog, and I’d like to talk about the app I’m making: REFLO. I’ll go into as much detail as I can about the problem REFLO started from, what it can do today, and how I plan to keep building it.

The story starts with a familiar scene

If you’ve ever done design work, you’ve probably run into a folder like this.

poster_draft.psd
poster_draft_revised.psd
poster_draft_revised_final.psd
poster_draft_revised_final_really_final.psd
poster_draft_revised_final_really_final_client_feedback.psd

It’s a familiar landscape: something extra keeps getting tacked onto the filename. Developers have Git, an excellent version-control tool that safely records every change to their code and lets them go back to any point they want. Designers and other people doing creative work never really had an equivalent.

Git isn’t completely absent, of course, but Git was built to compare changes in text-based code, line by line. You can’t compare images or document files that way, and a command-line workflow is a high barrier to entry. So a lot of people have protected their work by typing dates and version numbers into filenames by hand, or by leaning on the limited version history of a cloud drive.

• The moment you accidentally overwrite yesterday’s solid work and hours of progress disappear
• The moment a client says, “I liked the version from two weeks ago better,” and you have no idea which file that even is
• The moment you want to try a bold new draft, but hesitate because you might not be able to go back if it goes wrong

As those moments piled up, I started asking whether designers deserved something like a developer’s Git — but far more intuitive and visual. I decided to build that answer myself, and that’s how REFLO began.

What REFLO is trying to do

In a sentence, REFLO is a visual version-control tool for designers and creative professionals, fully at home on macOS.

The goal is simple. People who work with code can experiment freely and undo mistakes thanks to Git. People who work with images and documents should have the same freedom. And that experience should feel as natural as any other macOS app — no command line, no complicated setup.

What you can do with REFLO today

1. A timeline that builds itself while you work

Whenever a working file is saved, REFLO quietly records that moment. You don’t have to file things away yourself; just working is enough for a timeline to form. Later, when you wonder, “What did this look like then?”, you can flip through the timeline and look back at any point in the past.

2. Manual backups that pin important moments

Separate from the automatic record, you can make a backup (a milestone) yourself whenever you think, “I really want to keep this version.” Drafts you sent to a client, versions that got approved — those points show up clearly on the timeline, so they’re much easier to find later.

3. Four comparison modes you can see at a glance

The heart of REFLO is making “what changed” visible immediately. That’s why it offers four ways to compare.

• Split: divide the screen and place two versions side by side
• Overlay: stack the two versions and move a slider between them
• Heatmap: highlight changed areas in color so you can spot them at a glance
• Blink: rapidly alternate the two versions so even tiny differences stand out

For design work, seeing the comparison with your own eyes is far more useful than a list of text changes.

4. Support that isn’t trapped in a single file format

A designer’s work doesn’t end with one Photoshop file. Briefs are written in Word, decks in PowerPoint, asset lists in Excel. REFLO is being built so you can manage versions of PSD as well as docx, xlsx, pptx, and more, all in one tool.

5. Cloud History you can trust

If the record lives only on a local disk, a laptop failure or a damaged file can take the history with it. REFLO also keeps work history safely in the cloud so you don’t lose past records, no matter what happens.

6. Branches for freely trying another direction

There are moments when you think, “I want to try this draft in a completely different style, but I want to leave the original alone.” With branches, you can leave the original workstream as it is and experiment on a separate fork as much as you like. If you don’t like it, you can just leave that fork. If you do, you can compare, then bring that save into the current flow and keep working. It isn’t an automatic merge of two forks the way Git does it; you pick the file at the moment you like and continue it as the current workstream.

What’s next

REFLO is currently in a stage of polishing features for individual workers, and we plan to ship those personal features first in August. For now I want to focus on getting one person’s work history managed safely and intuitively.

The next stage is collaboration for people working together. Rather than opening that to everyone from day one, we plan to invite a small number of teams, refine it in a private beta, and then launch it properly. When several people work on the same piece, issues around permissions, conflicts, and history management need to be validated and polished before we put them out.

Throughout all of this, feedback from people actually using REFLO matters more than anything. I believe you’ll surface problems I wouldn’t find alone, and needs I hadn’t thought of. That’s why I want to keep inviting beta testers and refining the product together, even before the official launch.

Closing

REFLO isn’t a grand team — it’s a project one person is building, piece by piece. That means it will take time to finish, and there will be gaps. But the direction — “designers deserve the freedom to undo, too” — is one I intend to keep.

This blog will keep recording the process of building REFLO, the decisions we wrestled with, and the features we add. Thank you for following along.

Thank you for reading.