Spider Diagram Brainstorming Tool

This tool is built on an idea from Frank Chimero’s excellent book “The Shape of Design” — the spider diagram method for brainstorming. You start with a central concept and an audience, and the tool generates a full node diagram with branches radiating outward, each exploring different associative paths. You can zoom, pan, and click any node to get context on why it was chosen and how it connects back to the central idea. Click into subtopics and they expand further. It’s all rendered with D3.js so the interaction feels fluid, and there’s also a markdown list view if you prefer to scan things linearly rather than spatially.

Where it gets interesting

The real payoff is in the campaign idea generation. The tool produces 7 creative campaign concepts by intentionally combining nodes from different branches — crossing unrelated concepts to spark unexpected connections. That’s the whole Chimero method in action: creativity lives at the intersection of things that don’t obviously belong together. A node from the “emotional resonance” branch colliding with one from “material properties” gives you something neither branch would produce on its own. The ideas aren’t meant to be final — they’re meant to be provocative starting points that push your thinking in directions you wouldn’t have gone alone.

An important caveat

I want to be honest about something: doing brainstorming by hand is still the best way to do this. When your own brain makes the connections, it draws from your entire life experience — memories, conversations, things you’ve seen, stuff you care about — and that produces ideas with a texture and specificity that AI simply can’t replicate. This tool is for when you’ve exhausted your own thinking and want a different perspective, or when you need to quickly explore a problem space before going deep. It’s a complement to human creativity, not a substitute. If you haven’t read “The Shape of Design,” seriously go pick it up — it’ll change how you think about the creative process.