Hand-calculated conic splines
Five fragments for the week of August 12, 2024
Hello from the middle of August. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
Currently counting down the days to our annual LEGOLAND visit with the kids. I got deep into LEGO during the pandemic, well before our kids were old enough to be my cover story, so it’s been a joy to see them take to it in earnest.
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
First of all, let it be said that 3D CAD tools are fantastically wonderfully super great. Who wants to go back to the bad-old-days of lungs full of urethane foam dust, hand-drafting phantom lines and hand-calculated conic splines, and spending sixteen hours on a marker rendering only to learn that a design change requires a complete do-over? 3D CAD makes our lives as designers absurdly easy by comparison. (With the added benefit of allowing middle-management to be less decisive than ever! But I digress.)
– Adam O’Hern, “The Most Annoying Thing in CAD: Survey Says…,” SolidSmack, September 5, 2014. Back on the CAD beat and found this post from nearly a decade ago. I miss this old voicey style of tech blog.
These days, when you create a document — whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation — you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way.
– Sam Schillace, “More sharing,” Google’s blog, June 19, 2007. A tight 115-word post announcing the acquisition of Zenter, a “web based presentation app that promises to really take advantage of being online” that was part of one of YC’s first batches. First, it’s refreshing to remember that 115-word blog posts are possible. Second, the broader point made here holds up 17 years later, except now it’s true of every piece of workplace software. Enter Liveblocks.
What could be more fulfilling in life than to realize one’s absolute potential? And what could be sadder than to fail for lack of the proper equipment?
– Ad for SyncSort in Computerworld, November 26, 1984. I’m into the arresting tone here. “SyncSort—for those who abhor wasted potential. Make us prove it: Call (201) 568-9700.” Found by way of a footnote on the Wikipedia article for Lotus 1-2-3. (Thinking about the past and future of spreadsheets.)
There’s always a few key elements [LEGO bricks] we want to use. In the case of Z-Blob, we wanted to capture this vinyl toy feel. It’s a little bit cleaner. Bunchu uses macaroni elements—a lot of the models share this piece. In the sketches, I grab onto those key pieces. I try to use those [in the concept art] so they can guide the builder, but then the rest is broad brushstrokes. I typically paint in Photoshop with a brush that looks like a two by four brick, it helps give a quick LEGO DNA—I use that one brush for everything, it’s kind of the LEGO style brush.
– Matt Betteker, concept artist at LEGO, in “Dreaming Big,” an article about the creation of LEGO’s Dreamzzz theme in issue 103 of Blocks magazine, published spring 2023. Looking ahead to this week’s LEGOLAND visit with the kids, I remembered them making a big push on promoting Dreamzzz at our last few visits and got curious about the origin story. This piece answered all my questions and more, and included some golden behind-the-scenes details like this one about the handoff between concept artists and set builders at LEGO.
Where do you think yours ranks among “most successful dreams of all time”
– Speaking of dreams: @brokenandrj on Twitter/X, August 9, 2024, in response to Drew Daniel of Matmos posting about a compilation of electronic tracks inspired by his viral tweet (16M views!) about a new genre called hit em: “had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called “hit em” that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl.” I love the idea of a global stack rank of “most successful dreams of all time.” (Thanks to Chris Xu for the posts pointing me to the “hit em” saga.)
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com