The lamp and the zero
Your pointer is a lamp. The zero’s shading turns to face it and its shadow swings away, worked out line by line.
Explorations
This is where I try things. Interaction studies, generative plates, type experiments, concept tools and the odd real one. Everything here is live: press a sheet and it plots again.
Your turn
Draw one line. The plotter does the rest, and the sheet is yours to keep.
Nothing is uploaded. The line and the PNG stay in your browser.
Filed here
- Interaction studies
- 6
- Generative plates
- 10
- Type experiments
- 4
- Concept tools
- 15
- Tools
- 1
- Sketches
- 7
36 finished pieces and 7 sketches. Newest 11 Nov 2026.
On the wall
Every piece has a date and a note. Anything tagged Concept is a tool I designed to show how I’d solve a problem. Nobody has bought one.
Quote builder for trades
Change one measurement and the price, the margin and the PDF the customer gets move together. A margin under your floor turns amber before the quote leaves.
For Internal tools
Sand table
A contour survey of ground that isn’t finished. Press to raise a hill, dig it out again, let the sea in.
Single stroke
Type a line and the pen letters it in capitals, one stroke at a time, lifting in between. The alphabet is my own.
Comb
A field of hatch that combs itself along the path you drag. It stays the way you leave it.
Spreadsheet-to-ops board
Drop in the planning sheet everyone is scared to touch. Each column gets a type, and the rows where the total does not match its parts light up before anything moves.
For Internal tools
Two hatches
Two sets of ruled lines, one turned a few degrees. The bands you see are in neither set.
Receipt
A printer that prints whatever you type and itemises it by length, the only thing a printer knows about your words.
Spring study
One switch and the curve of how it gets there. Flick it, change the stiffness, flick it again.
Client portal with live status
The client sees one status line and the one thing waiting on them. Approving a stage unlocks the next one and drafts its invoice.
For Internal tools
Stamp pad
A rubber stamp with real ink trouble: uneven pressure, dry patches, and a pad that runs out.
Enquiry-to-viewing desk
Forty portal enquiries for one flat fold into one group viewing, in the order people wrote. Replies are drafted in each person’s language. Nobody is ranked.
For Internal tools
Measure anything
Drag across a thing and a dimension line gives its size, read from the browser’s own layout.
Internal knowledge assistant
Ask where something stands and the answer arrives with numbered sources, each lighting the paragraph it came from. When the sources disagree, it says so and names who to ask.
For Internal tools
Tally
A counter that carries like a mechanical one. It starts at 96, so the good part is four presses away.
Lease reader and deadline calendar
Drop in a signed lease and it is read clause by clause. Every date the law hangs on it lands on one calendar, and the one that is close turns red.
For Internal tools
No-show and recall manager
A cancellation comes in, the slot is offered to someone on the waitlist who fits, and it refills. Slots at risk carry a reason, never a score.
For Health
Orthotics production board
Every pair of insoles on one board, from scan to fitting. Drag a card to Printing, a printer takes it, and every ready-by time recalculates.
For Health
Referral and document reader
A faxed referral is read field by field, and every field draws a box on the page where it was found. What the reader is unsure of stays amber until a person confirms it.
For Health
Clinic intake and routing desk
Voicemails, forms and messages land in one queue that re-orders itself by rules the clinic wrote, and says why. It routes requests. A person decides.
For Health
Content mover
Old CMS markup goes in, typed content blocks come out, and a counter proves no word was lost on the way. The odd ones wait for a person.
For Migrations
Migration control room
Rehearse a site move before launch: every old URL is tested, the passes turn green in waves and the failures pin to the top until someone decides.
For Migrations
Voice agent call console
Replay a phone agent’s call word by word and watch the booking land in the calendar at the second it was made. For the manager who has to audit the calls.
For Product and MVP
Self-structuring CRM
A CRM that reads the call and fills in the record, with every field tied to the sentence it came from. You accept or reject; nothing is saved behind your back.
For Product and MVP
Agent run console
Every step an AI agent took, on a timeline you can drag backwards. Made for the person who approves what it does, in their words and not an engineer’s.
For Product and MVP
Horizon
Noise ridgelines drawn front to back. Each line only shows where it rises above everything in front of it. The sun sits behind them.
Plot your name
Type a word and it is engraved in hatching. The word is its own seed, so your name always plots the same way.
The zero
The web0 mark as a torus, shaded in four hatch layers. Its shadow is the one place the second pen goes.
Hatched type
One Instrument Serif glyph, hatched dark to light, with an offset shadow.
Survey of zeros
A contour map where the hills are zeros. The orange ring is the summit. There is a north arrow, because surveys have one.
Exploded stack
Product, site and brand as three plates. Each plate hides what sits under it, so no line is drawn that you couldn’t see.
Flow field
Streamlines through a noise field, kept a pen width apart.
Harmonograph
Two pendulums per axis, slightly out of tune, slowly running out of swing. The last turns are in orange.
Drift
A grid of squares that loses its order row by row. Like a project with no scope.
Truchet
Square tiles with quarter arcs in one of two turns. The paths join by themselves.
squish
My image compressor. It makes pictures smaller without changing their size in pixels, and it runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.
The sketchbook
Rough studies behind the finished pieces, plotted from seeds, with the pencil left in. It scrolls sideways.
Zero, first ovalsSix ovals round one centre, to find the zero’s proportion. The underlined ratio is the one that read best. Shadow lengthsHow far the second pen’s shadow should fall. Too short reads as a smudge, too long as a second zero. Hatch anglesOne square at six angles. 45° is the usual hatch for a cut face, so that is the one the site uses. Letter skeletonsThe hard letters of the single-stroke alphabet on their guide lines. The ring is where the pen comes down first. Spring curvesThree dampings on one axis, to see how a switch should settle. Section A–AA cut through two hills, to check that the contour interval reads as height. Gallery layoutsThree ways to file this page. The one with the tick is the one you are looking at.
The paid work gets the same pen.
Everything on this page was made for the fun of it. The same care goes into the sites, brands and products people hire me for, at a fixed price.