The Tools We Choose

There is a version of craft that is purely about output. The painting, the interface, the building. And then there is the quieter version — the one that includes the choosing of brushes, the setup of the studio, the configuration of the environment.

I have spent an embarrassing amount of time configuring tools. And I have slowly come to believe that this is not procrastination. It is design.

Defaults are arguments

Every application ships with defaults. A typeface, a grid, a colour. These are not neutral choices. They encode assumptions about what good looks like, what the user needs, what the purpose of the tool is. When you accept defaults without examining them, you are accepting someone else's argument.

This is sometimes fine. Defaults exist because someone thought hard about them. But it is worth knowing which defaults you are living with, and why.

Friction is information

When a tool resists you, that resistance is worth examining. It might mean you are doing something the tool was not designed for — which is useful to know. It might mean the tool is poorly designed. Or it might mean you are thinking about the problem the wrong way.

I have changed my mind about a problem more than once because a tool made the original approach feel impossible.