Sublime is a new visual note-taking tool that enables you to capture a personal library of connected thoughts, view AI-curated thoughts from your collection and others and view them in a visual environment.
Sublime first came to my attention when its developer, Sari Azout, published an incredible thesis on Every.to that outlined the limitations of current productivity tools and how they should be re-thought to better support creative work.
She also presented a new vision for creative tools that will enable us to more easily capture what inspires us, arrange it into loosely structured collections of thought, surface intriguing connections between ideas and accelerate our creativity.
But Sari’s thesis isn’t just theoretical. She and her team have built an application called Sublime to bring her ambitious creative vision to life.
That’s why I was compelled to connect with her to learn about the thinking behind Sublime, what makes it unique and how it empowers creative and visual thinking. Here’s my conversation with her.
Chuck Frey: What was the genesis behind Sublime? What convinced you that a tool like this needed to exist?
Sari Azout: It’s taken me a lifetime to get here, but Sublime is where all of my deeply held beliefs coalesce into one piece of software.
There are two sides to Sublime.
The first is the more practical one – anyone looking to do great work needs to cultivate a repository of interesting ideas and a quiet space to think and grapple with their ideas. And in that sense, Sublime is the result of a decade of looking for the perfect tool to collect and connect ideas.
I wanted something easy to use, without a steep learning curve or excessive customization. Something that would let me capture anything from anywhere and show it to me in a way that makes sense. Something purpose built to curate my knowledge library, without doubling as a to-do list or project management tool. Something that felt equal parts personal and communal. This last part’s key – we are combining the focus and intentionality of a PKM (personal knowledge management) tool with the serendipity and aliveness of a social space.
When you add a thought, link, or idea to Sublime, we immediately show you related ideas from other people’s libraries. The magic and serendipity is multiplied in community.
The second is the cultural frame. The software itself is marbled with our values – creativity is more important than productivity, intention over attention, we over me.
Each of these points has depth. Take creativity over productivity. The productivity mindset that we’ve optimized for over the last few decades won’t serve us in the future. As more human jobs become automated or replaced by artificial intelligence, we have to shift our focus to areas we have a competitive advantage over machines: creativity, taste, expressing old things in new ways, infusing ideas with meaning. Sublime is designed to help you cultivate a state of flow that is conducive to creativity. Humans aren’t good at making things from scratch. Our genius lies in taking something and evolving it. Sublime helps in this space before an idea.
Frey: What were your goals in creating Sublime?
Azout: The thing that I have been chasing all along is the feeling of a more sublime Internet – a space that combines the calm of a library with the sense of aliveness and serendipity of a coffee shop. I didn’t see anything on the market that made me feel this way so the original goal was to create a product I would want to use myself.
Now, my goal is to build a sustainable business that is meaningful for the people it serves and that will be around for decades to come. Sublime is a very ambitious endeavor, but we are growing it at the speed of trust.
Frey: What makes Sublime different from typical PKM applications?
Azout: Sublime is simpler, more relational, and more communal.
- Simpler: Sublime feels more like a yoga studio than an airplane cockpit. We believe a simple product doesn’t just function better; it brings people joy.
- Relational: Most tools help you collect ideas. Sublime helps you collect AND connect them.
- Communal: While you can keep everything private, the secret sauce of Sublime is the communal experience. When you save something (privately or publicly), you get a stream of related ideas the Sublime community found fascinating.
Frey: How does Sublime support and enhance serendipity?
Azout: While traditional note-taking apps like Apple Notes or Notion lock information into hierarchical systems—burying ideas inside folders or pages—Sublime takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of restricting information to a single location, Sublime represents each piece of information as a standalone “card” that can be freely combined and connected with others in multiple ways. This flexibility enables serendipitous discoveries, much like how a chef creates new dishes by combining individual ingredients in unexpected ways.
Here’s a practical example:
Take this quote from designer Don Norman: “Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”
This insight could be valuable for your design resources collection as well as your newsletter content repository.
In traditional apps like Notion, you’d face a dilemma: either create duplicate copies of the quote in separate pages (one under “Design Resources” and another under “Newsletter Content”), or implement a complex workaround.
In Sublime, you simply create one card with the quote and add it to both your “Design Resources” and “Newsletter Content” collections. The system then automatically surfaces related ideas and shows you how others have incorporated this quote into their libraries, creating endless pathways for curiosity and discovery.
Frey: Can you walk me through a typical user scenario, including how the AI will surface related notes automatically?
Azout: Let’s suppose you are a writer and are collecting inspiration for an essay on the importance of shifting from a productivity to a creativity-first mindset.
As you explore this topic, Sublime’s AI surfaces relevant connections at every stage:
- Starting with a Collection: You might create a collection called “Creativity > Productivity” and begin gathering materials—articles, images, links, snippets. As you build this collection, Sublime automatically suggests related cards.
- At the Card Level: When you open any individual card, like this insight on creative work Sublime shows you related cards that share conceptual connections.
- In the Canvas View: Once you’ve gathered your raw material, you can map out your thinking visually using Canvas. As you arrange your cards, Sublime suggests relevant ideas that could enrich your thinking.
Throughout this process, every element in Sublime becomes a portal to deeper understanding, helping you discover unexpected connections and develop more nuanced insights. The system doesn’t just store your research; it actively helps you think by surfacing relevant ideas precisely when they could be most valuable to your work.
Frey: You mentioned that as of mid-December, you’ll be adding a canvas to Sublime. What new capabilities will that bring to your tool?
Azout: Canvas is now live on Sublime!
Traditional PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) tools excel at helping you collect and organize information, but they often fall short when it comes to active engagement with ideas. Sublime Canvas bridges this gap by providing an environment specifically designed for critical thinking and synthesis that is connected to your knowledge library.
While many people have turned to tools like Figma or Miro for visual thinking beyond design work—writing essays, planning research, or mapping concepts—they face a fundamental limitation: their inspiration lives in a separate place, requiring constant context-switching and manual copy-pasting.
Sublime Canvas transforms this experience by seamlessly connecting three critical elements of the creative process:
1. Your personal library of collected ideas
2. Sublime’s vast network of curated insights
3. A spatial thinking environment
Frey: One of the most interesting aspects of Sublime’s functionality is the idea that you can pull in related notes from other people’s accounts. What are the advantages of that approach and how will it work?
Azout: There’s something profoundly limiting about the way most of us currently manage our knowledge—working in isolation within our personal note-taking tools. While tools like Notion or Apple Notes can help with personal organization, they miss out on an extraordinary opportunity for intellectual cross-pollination.
Surfacing related cards from other people’s libraries multiplies the creative possibilities in your research, and the benefits of building a library on Sublime.
Frey: In your thesis, you point out that the majority of PKM tools on the market today are too focused on idea convergence. Why is that a problem? In contrast, how does Sublime help with idea divergence?
Azout: Many of the most pressing challenges we face as a society are fuzzy and non-linear – they require extensive exploration, reframing, and connecting seemingly unrelated concepts before we can even properly define the problem, let alone arrive at solutions.
Sublime is designed to cultivate the space and mindset that allows ideas to generate.
Frey: What are foraging and hunting in the context of idea development, and how does Sublime support both?
Azout: When discovering ideas, we alternate between two modes: “foraging” – where we serendipitously discover interesting things without knowing their future value, and “hunting” – where we deliberately seek specific information. The challenge is that if we save everything we encounter without a clear purpose, we risk creating an unusable digital graveyard. But if we only save the things that relate to very specific projects or intentions we currently have, we miss unexpected connections that could spark insights in the future.
Sublime addresses this paradox by supporting both modes: you can quickly capture sparks of inspiration without immediate categorization, while still maintaining enough intentionality through lightweight organization.
Frey: Let’s talk about connecting ideas. I’ve always felt like linear note-taking tools like Evernote, Roam and Notion are somewhat limited in their ability to help users connect ideas. You can’t see more than 1 or 2 notes at a time. How does Sublime overcome this limitation to enable a greater number of potential connections between ideas?
Azout: It really comes down to the information architecture and UX choices we’ve made.
In Sublime, the atomic unit is the insight. Every piece of media – a quote, a highlight, an image, an article, a video – is represented as a “card.” Using a card-based system lets you scroll through multiple pieces of content simultaneously, making it easier to spot patterns and connections.
Frey: In your thesis, you talk about collections. How can they act as meaningful containers for creative work? How do they function in Sublime as places for nurturing ideas and connections?
Azout: Unlike traditional tags that just answer “what is this about?” collections in Sublime are designed to answer the more purposeful question “in what context will I want to revisit this later?” This shift from topic-based organization to context and actionability means collections can naturally evolve into concrete creative outputs.
For example, my dreaming of a better internet collection started as scattered thoughts but grew into a print publication. My creativity > productivity collection became an essay published on Every. My collection about early days of ambitious projects I’m hoping one day becomes a podcast.
Frey: As you describe it in your Every thesis, the AI can function as a just-in-time creative assistant. How does that work?
Azout: Think of Sublime as having that brilliant friend who always says “This reminds me of…” except this friend is available 24/7. Sublime’s AI surfaces relevant insights from both your personal library and the broader Sublime community precisely when they could be most useful to your work.
Frey: In your thesis, you also say this: “I begin to feel as though the internet is molding itself around my intentions, transforming from a distraction machine into a precision instrument for creativity.” What do you mean by this, and how is Sublime helping to bring it about now?
Azout: Today, you open your phone and see a feed of all sorts of unrelated things designed to engage you. Attention is the currency of the web.
Fifteen years ago if you wanted to read the news you would pick up the newspaper on your front porch, read for 30 minutes, then carry on with your day. Today everything on the web is hyper engineered to capture your attention. This represents a huge loss of agency.
We are building Sublime to help deepen your intention instead of hijacking your attention.
In Sublime, the best way to discover content is to set an intention – to put in a thought or idea – then get a stream of related ideas. Whether you are using our canvas, a Google Doc, or are on the Sublime web or mobile app – this inverts the Internet’s consumption model.
An Internet that molds around your intention will replace billions of passive consumers with active creators.
Frey: How can readers of Visual Velocity get an opportunity to try Sublime?
Azout: Sublime is currently in private beta. Visual Velocity readers can get early access by clicking here.
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