Terrain Studio
A collaborative design tool for landscape architects with real-time multiplayer editing.
Terrain Studio is a design and collaboration tool for landscape architecture firms. The core insight: the design review process was broken, and fixing it required rethinking the canvas, not just adding comments to an existing tool.
My Role
I worked with the founding team from concept through launch — product strategy, interface design, and front-end implementation. The stack uses a WebSocket server for real-time sync and a canvas API for rendering.
Design Challenges
The hardest problem wasn’t the multiplayer sync — it was the awareness layer. How do you show multiple people working on the same document without the interface becoming chaotic?
We landed on a minimal presence system: initials in the corner, a coloured cursor per user, and a soft highlight around whatever area each person is actively working in. Enough to orient yourself; not enough to distract.
The Problem
Landscape architects were emailing PDFs back and forth and annotating over phone calls. The collaboration problem was being solved the same way it was in 2005.
The Solution
A browser-based canvas tool built around a shared multiplayer session. Every team member sees the same site plan, in real time. Comments are anchored to specific locations on the canvas.