Rough draft of my current tools-for-thought thinking.

Trying out style paint for components, piggybacking off Tailwind.

I'm excited for all the energy around tools for thought. Some notes on my current thoughts (probably to be revised in future entries).

Blocks as the basic unit

Blocks as a basic, contained, and usually addressable unit feels to me "right". You can see it in Notion and Roam and many others.

brikfont - lego typeface experiments

From: https://www.instagram.com/brikfont/

I'm excited for all the energy around tools for thought. Some notes on my current thoughts (probably to be revised in future entries).

Blocks as the basic unit

Blocks as a basic, contained, and usually addressable unit feels to me "right". You can see it in Notion and Roam and many others.

CSS Paint - paint using brushes defined in CSS.

https://css-paint.constraint.systems

How do you change things?

I'm interested in users having the ability to personalize websites. I've mainly thought about it as a case for UI that lets you choose different options, probably powered by CSS (see components.ai's CSS.GUI).

My CSS Paint project lets you use a brush. It's interesting to use a brush. Should we let people style their website using a brush to paint styles on to divs?

CSS painting a dog

Getting closer on the CSS Paint design. Dropped the retro theme for now.

CSS paintings

More CSS paint work, with reordering support and some retro borders.

More CSS paint experiments.

CSS paint, maybe

Almost done with the bare-bones user account and place creation features for the div and CSS building blocks app.

More work on setting up a system of building blocks using divs, text fields, and CSS.

Div structure.

I'm excited about CSS again. After experimenting with making layout-from-scratch apps with WebGL/Three.js in an attempt to avoid the sprawl (and creating my own mini-sprawl in the process) I'm rethinking approaches.

I'm interested in making applications where users customize with their own CSS. My bet is that if we get the initial primitives right, this could allow users to truly customize and feel at home in their spaces.

Benefits

Blocks.

Containers.

I keep bouncing off ideas for the next Constraint Systems thing, this isn't quite it... but maybe near.