© 2024
Tools
I am building custom design tools and I am doing it for many reasons*.
Tools I’ve made so far:
1) Kollageuer. Overpainting tool to create kollages by sampling found images and using these samples as a paint.
2) Allloe. Slit-scanner glitch tool.
3) Draaaw. Web tool to draaaaaaw with the little bits of visual culture.
4) Mememoirés Sampler for the “Mememoirés” project.
5) Litradio sign constructor.
6) Sunflower floret model.
Reasons
1) Result
Custom tool makes the result repeatable and fitting all the constraints in a way you want it to fit.
2) Constraints
Limiting your abilities to the essential minimum can provide focused and stressless workflow with clear results. You know what you’re doing.
3) Convenience
Tool is always parametric, so you can adjust everything on a fly, saving time, money and headspace for more important things like thinking about ideas and meaning of the project. As well as experimenting further and building more tools.
4) Experience-1
Making your own UX can affect the whole process and how you perceive the result.
5) Experience-2
Working under the hood can affect how you think about things, processes, design in general. It’s good experience.
6) Repetition
Sometimes something needs to be done a lot of times for you to finally get it.
7) Fun
It’s nice to experiment.
The goal is not only the final result but the whole thing (from initial idea to implementation) and by the way you learn stuff (P5, JS, math, life).
Influences
A) My father built his own workshop (two workshops) with custom made woodwork machines, welding machine and all other stuff to keep workshop running. And this workshop made our home running as well with all custom built furniture and endless modernisations and repairs.
B) David Lynch as a filmmaker and carpenter. Starting with set designs and ending with this phone camera mount. Watch the whole video — it’s brilliant.
C) Casey ← Van Neistat ← Tom Sachs. Through Casey I’ve found out about other two and their shared (Sachs’s) obsessive customisation, organisation and object building technique.
D) Early Sagmeister Inc., and Karllsonwilker with their design experiments. Studio Moniker and their experiments. Richard The.
E) Brian Eno and his generative music. He wasn’t first but he was the one I’ve seen first.
&) And of course my education background, studying Theoretical and Applied Mechanics as well as mathematics, programming and engineering and early home experiments with Turbo Pascal when I was a school boy.
*) This explanation is work in progress too.