This is an article written by Jan Middendorp for a LettError monograph published in 2000. It is ostensibly about Just and Erik, but on the whole I think it represents what I have learned in this past year: make your own tools, don’t let your tools make your design.

Tools can do amazing things—they can create perfection every time. As one of the section titles says, “A hammer can do what a hand can’t”. We need tools, and good tools are built on the ideas of other tools; progress on top of progress. If it didn’t exist so, every time I wanted to write a blog post I would have to invent fire all over again.

I’ve learned that we can’t let our ideas be constrained by our tools, however. Every time I hear of someone opening up Illustrator “just to get some ideas down” I get a shiver now. I get similar shivers when I hear people only using the tools inside of FontLab, or the macros others have written. I get shivers every time I read the desperate pleas of graphic designers on blogs and mailing lists imploring, “Please, Adobe… Maybe in CS6 you could include this…?” I was once like that, and now I know I was locked in a box.

Use those tools, yes, but don’t make them your crutch. I believe that everyone using a computer—our finest tool to date—should not take anything on its face. If something made by someone else is not working for you, hack it or write it yourself. If you find yourself wasting time with a repeatable task, invest the time now to automate it instead of wasting your entire life doing it over and over again.

Most importantly of all, the computer cannot give you ideas like a hammer cannot tell you how to build a house. In the article Middendorp warns of letting the “toolspace” become bigger than the “ideaspace”. Always maintain a large ideaspace, and then modify or make your tools to fit that space, enabling you to make your ideaspace even larger.

Thanks to Gustavo Ferreira (@hipertipo) for reminding me of this article.