Let’s Talk About Tools • Doubleshot
The assemblage of tools not only implies something about which tasks should be possible, but also how they should be carried out.
Liam Spradlin
A couple of things caught my eye over the past week that have me thinking about how we think about tools as designers. The first was a post I saw in my Threads feed about Apple’s original Sketch UI kit for liquid glass. This version of the kit—developed before Sketch added a glass effect to its beta branch—uses a slew of fills, blurs, and inner shadows to create UI elements while Apple waited for Sketch to incorporate a higher-fidelity version of iOS’ new look.
The second was an article that came across my feed predicting that, in the future, creative tools will be more like creative works themselves, rather than neutral blank canvases.
While I have a lot to say about the latter (maybe in a separate post), I was struck in both cases by the implied or assumed relationship between designer and tools, as well as the different ways we seem to define “tools” as designers. Those thoughts are what inspired this issue of the Doubleshot.
As always, I hope what I’ll share below enriches your practice and, if so, that you’ll pass it along to a friend. Let’s get started.
