Creating the Brainforest: How Sana A. Ahmed uses the LYT frameworks (Obsidian)

Sana A. Ahmed’s capstone for the Light workshop reframes personal knowledge management as a “world-building” experience: she builds an Obsidian-based system she calls the Brain Forest, then publishes it in a way that makes ideas easier to navigate, not just store. The core move is treating structure, visuals, and even emoji semantics as part of how thinking flows—so the system supports research, content creation, and sharing with less friction.

Obsidian’s Graph feature becomes the centerpiece for her day-to-day work. By customizing the graph view, she can see visual hierarchy and relationships among notes and projects, which helps her make progress inside a dense course and support research design for a white paper. She also relies on Obsidian’s “existing files only” behavior to control clutter: when enabled, she avoids surfacing large numbers of empty notes created during contextual learning, keeping the Brain Forest usable rather than crowded.

Her file organization is intentionally clean but not “best practice” by fluid-framework standards. She keeps a small number of top-level folders and uses a status/category approach so items can be tucked away without endless scrolling. A distinctive design choice is that emojis function like a ranking system inside her folder hierarchy—emoji-labeled items sit above numerically labeled ones. That creates a tradeoff: she wants her journal near the top for usability, but she doesn’t want to sacrifice the visual consistency of emoji-only folder names.

Tags and loose relationships also play a role. Having never used tagging beyond social media, she adopts tags to create navigable connections, then visualizes those connections through the graph. But her biggest takeaway from the workshop is less about mechanics and more about intent: she builds a future-proof system that reflects how she researches and shares, while staying fun, expressive, and easy to publish.

To make the Brain Forest legible from the outside, she defines a “bird’s-eye view” home note she calls the Core. From there, she maps idea emergence through a four-phase model—ingesting, digesting, consuming, and ejesting—where ejesting is framed as content that can “fertilize” the Brain Forest (and, by extension, the wider internet). She connects this process to her marketing and branding lens, describing consumption as something that can be healthier when guided by a structured flow.

Publishing is designed to reduce clutter for viewers. Using Obsidian Publish, she adds custom headers so readers don’t face a wall of plain text, and she uses a custom theme built from Nick’s Cybertron theme plus CSS tweaks, with help from the Obsidian forum and Reggie from Cohort One. She also standardizes branding with the Futura font across her site and materials.

Her first major content release is an analysis of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, structured with her write-up, scene-by-scene interpretations (with clips where available), and related links that route back into the Brain Forest. She plans to expand into branding, perception of reality, and other mediums (epubs, books, essays, videos), while setting dated goals and tracking deadlines through a separate project management app because Obsidian lacks reminders. The project ends with an invitation: readers can visit her website, donate, and email for a link to the system.