How I built El Carot

Where it started

A deck I always had to carry

A few years ago I made El Carot, a tarot deck built from collages, as a personal project. It has the 22 major arcana, and every one of them is a character people recognize from everyday life. The Fool is Charly. The Chariot is Christopher Columbus. Death is Scarface.

People have a lot of fun with it. Someone pulls a card, sees who is on it, laughs, and then actually reads what it means. But there was one problem: the deck only existed when I had it with me. No deck, no reading.

So I wanted an app. Something anyone could open on their phone to pull a card, without depending on me.

Version 1

My brother – the developer – version

I'm a designer, and I didn't know how to code. So the first version was made by my brother, who is a developer. It was very simple: all the cards flashed past on the screen, really fast, and when you tapped, the deck stopped and showed you one card.

There were no meanings, no text, nothing to read. But it already solved the main thing: people could pull a card without me.

The hard part was changing it. Every time I wanted something different, I had to ask my brother. It took his time and mine, and every small change was a lot of effort.

Version 2

Writing the meanings, and loading them myself

A card without its meaning is only half a reading. So I sat down and wrote a meaning for each of the 22 cards, with ChatGPT helping me shape the texts.

Then came the part I had never done: getting them into the site. This time I did it myself, with a friend sitting next to me showing me how to ask Claude for things. Not writing code, just asking the right questions and checking what came back.

Shout out to Andy Osinski, who sat next to me and showed me how to ask.

That was the first time I changed a website with my own hands. It was small, but it changed how I thought about what I could build.

Version 3

Building the whole thing myself, with CodeYam

A few months later I started using CodeYam, and El Carot was the first project I made with it. I wanted to see if I could build the full app on my own: not just add text to someone else's site, but design and make every screen.

This is the first message I wrote:

Now El Carot is a calm, bilingual tarot app. You can ask a question and get the card that answers it, ask for a message with no question at all, or pull the card of the day. Every card, title and reading exists in Spanish and English, and switching language never loses your reading.

There are no accounts. It is a short ritual that works on your phone, which was the whole point.

Looking back

Each version needed a little less help

First my brother built it for me. Then a friend sat next to me while I changed it. Then I built the whole app on my own, starting from the design I already had in Figma.

Now, when I don't have the deck with me, I don't need it. Anyone can open elcarot.com and pull a card.