# Tim Potter

> Personal site of Tim Potter, a UK-based product designer, developer and co-founder of Little Thunder. Home for side projects, experiments and notes outside the studio. Recently launched MegaWord (a Sega Mega Drive demake of Wordle) and currently building Footi AR (an augmented-reality football match report) and Band Mate (a Logic Pro MIDI plugin for generating metalcore drum arrangements).

Tim Potter is a product designer, developer and creative technologist based in the United Kingdom. By day he is co-founder of [Little Thunder](https://littlethunder.co), a studio designing digital products, interfaces and websites. The rest of his time goes into personal projects, including a launched Sega Mega Drive homebrew game (MegaWord), an in-progress augmented-reality football match report (Footi AR) and an in-progress Audio Unit plugin for Logic Pro (Band Mate). He also writes about the intersection of design, AI tooling and retro game development.

This site, timpotter.dev, hosts that personal work. It is separate from the studio site at littlethunder.co.

## Core pages

- [Home](https://timpotter.dev/): Landing page with current projects and recent writing
- [About](https://timpotter.dev/about/): Background, work history and contact
- [Projects](https://timpotter.dev/projects/): Index of personal projects
- [Writing](https://timpotter.dev/blog/): Index of blog posts
- [Events](https://timpotter.dev/events/): Events organised or presented by Tim Potter
- [Privacy](https://timpotter.dev/privacy/): Privacy notice (UK GDPR-aligned)

## Events

- [Impromptu](https://timpotter.dev/events/): A free, informal lunch-and-learn for designers, creatives and makers exploring AI and design. Thursday 10 September 2026, 12:30–13:30 at Ormeau Labs, Belfast. Speakers: Robert Stringer and Tim Potter. Registration: https://luma.com/iushymdn

## Projects

- [Footi AR](https://timpotter.dev/projects/footi-ar/): An augmented-reality match report for Footi. Places both starting XIs on a virtual pitch you can walk around on your phone, with tappable player stats and a scrubbable timeline of goals, cards and substitutions. Falls back to a 3D preview without camera access. Status: in progress
- [HyperDrift](https://timpotter.dev/projects/hyperdrift/): An endless synthwave racer that runs entirely in the browser. No download, no asset files. World, obstacles and a live-synthesized soundtrack all generated in code with three.js and WebAudio. Status: released, playable at https://hyperdrift.netlify.app
- [MegaWord](https://timpotter.dev/projects/megaword/): A Sega Mega Drive homebrew Wordle demake. Five letters, six guesses, running on 16-bit hardware. Built with SGDK, custom pixel-art workflows and AI tooling. Status: released, free download at https://tp-dev.itch.io/megaword
- [Band Mate](https://timpotter.dev/projects/band-mate/): A Logic Pro MIDI plugin that profiles real metalcore bands (Polaris, Sleep Token, August Burns Red, Killswitch Engage, Currents, Architects, Parkway Drive) and generates full drum arrangements by song section. Exports MIDI direct to Logic. Status: past MVP, in progress
- [Ceefax](https://timpotter.dev/projects/ceefax/): A broadcast-era teletext interface rebuilt for the modern web. Live football data wrapped in block colours, Mode 7 typography and CRT glow. Built with Gabriel Muldoon. Status: released, live at https://footi-retro.netlify.app/
- [SGDK Palette Swapper](https://timpotter.dev/projects/sgdk-palette-swapper/): A custom Photoshop colour-swap tool that converts modern artwork into Mega Drive-safe palettes. Built to solve the background art pipeline problem on MegaWord
- [Zap](https://timpotter.dev/projects/zap/): A Figma plugin for exporting compressed PNG, JPG and WEBP assets with file-size previews, ZIP packaging and cleaner batch image export controls

## Writing

- [Introducing Impromptu](https://timpotter.dev/blog/introducing-impromptu/): Announcement of Impromptu, a free monthly lunch-and-learn on AI and design co-hosted with Chris Armstrong at Ormeau Labs, Belfast. First session Thursday 10 September 2026 with Robert Stringer on creative AI workflows and Tim Potter on AI tooling meeting retro hardware
- [AI Will Eat Itself](https://timpotter.dev/blog/ai-will-eat-itself/): Opinion piece on generative AI training on an increasingly AI-written web. Covers the Ahrefs and Graphite figures on AI-generated content, the Nature research on model collapse, and why Anthropic's new watermarking could help models tell human work from their own
- [Connecting a Sega Mega Drive to the Internet Without Connecting It to the Internet](https://timpotter.dev/blog/connecting-a-mega-drive-to-the-internet/): How MegaWord's online leaderboards work without the console ever going online. A short code generated from your finishing time is the handshake between 1990s hardware and the modern web
- [When Does a Design Stop Belonging to Its Creator?](https://timpotter.dev/blog/when-does-a-design-stop-belonging-to-its-creator/): Opinion piece prompted by Fender's reported cease-and-desist letters over Stratocaster-style guitars. What happens when a product design becomes so iconic it stops being a product and becomes a category
- [72 Hours With Claude Fable](https://timpotter.dev/blog/72-hours-with-fable/): Building the HyperDrift racer with his kids using Claude Fable, in the brief window before a US export-control directive blocked foreign-national access and Anthropic pulled the model
- [Your Product Is Their Feature](https://timpotter.dev/blog/your-product-is-their-feature/): Opinion piece on Sherlocking in the AI era. Platform companies absorb functionality faster than ever, so value is moving from features to trust, community, workflow and brand
- [Life Beyond the Feed](https://timpotter.dev/blog/life-beyond-the-feed/): On personal websites, owning your own corner of the internet, and why authenticity is becoming more valuable than reach in an age of algorithmic feeds
- [MVP to Meaningful](https://timpotter.dev/blog/mvp-to-meaningful/): Opinion piece on the gap between shipping an MVP and shipping something people actually want to use. AI lowers the cost of creation, but meaning still has a price
- [Claude Design, Google Stitch and why design is most certainly "not cooked"](https://timpotter.dev/blog/claude-design-stitch-not-cooked/): Opinion piece on AI design tools. The argument: AI is raising the baseline but making taste, judgement and original thinking more valuable, not less
- [Building MegaWord: Bringing Wordle to the Sega Mega Drive](https://timpotter.dev/blog/building-megaword/): The full build log. How a simple Wordle demake became a crash course in Mega Drive hardware, SGDK, palette quantisation, AI-assisted workflows and custom tooling
- [Hello and what this is](https://timpotter.dev/blog/hello-world/): Introduction to the site and the kind of work it covers

## Elsewhere

- [Little Thunder](https://littlethunder.co): The studio Tim co-founded
- [impromptu](http://impromptu.info/): The event Tim co-hosts
- [X](https://x.com/tejpotter): Personal X account
- [GitHub](https://github.com/timpotter): Code and open-source contributions
- [LinkedIn](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tim-potter-lt): Professional profile
- [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@timp-dev): Video content
- Email: hello@timpotter.dev

## Optional

- [RSS feed](https://timpotter.dev/rss.xml): Subscribe to blog posts
- [Sitemap](https://timpotter.dev/sitemap.xml): Full site index
- [OG image](https://timpotter.dev/og.png): Default social-share image