Ink & Switch turns ten this year. For a decade, we’ve been chasing a stubborn question: what might software look like if it worked more like a workshop than a product? The answers keep surprising us. Our research into dynamic environments for creative work has grown from a simple versioned writing tool into a place where we can now build and share all kinds of things. Tenfold is how we’re marking the anniversary: ten letters, ten years, an interactive piece built inside our very own research environment, Patchwork. What follows is the origin story: from encounters with physical artifacts to a wall of Post-it notes to a Lab-wide art week.
Lab staff and alums explore neon and built signage in Berlin.
During our 2022 Unconference in Berlin, Lab staff visited the Buchstabenmuseum, which preserved salvaged shop signs and built letters from Berlin’s cityscape. I snapped photos of letters at the museum and around Berlin, which eventually made their way into a social image, an accordion-fold zine, and early musings about a typographic t-shirt when a simple logo would just not do.
Letters from the type museum printed in sequence made a nice little artifact to adorn my workspace.
Tenfold started where my work usually does: with a love of pattern, tools, and the kind of experience that puts you in front of an object and makes you want to know how it works. The aesthetic tying it together is black and white, crisp lines on a flat field. Minimal schematic diagrams, type specimens, vector strokes, logo collections, monochrome on phosphor. Turtle graphics, spirographs, the graphics of laser light shows. The X-wing targeting screen in Star Wars, the motion trackers in Aliens. The lineage runs through Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad and everything downstream of it.
In October 2024, members of the Lab visited John Underkoffler and Andy Milburn’s studio in Los Angeles. Andy had a harmonograph set up next to a copy of my personal favorite, Quadrivium, the Wooden Books compendium that includes Anthony Ashton’s Harmonograph. A month later I started building one in code.
I’m not a developer by trade. Code has been a medium for curiosity since Logo, but my ideas have always run ahead of what I could code myself. I liked the look of Andy’s harmonograph and wanted to see if I could generate one for print with a harmony that appealed to me. Here, agentic coding has been a real help: the skill required to build these tools surpassed my knowledge of code, but never my visual sensibility.
Post-it notes and postcards from Berlin, like a plotter art Ampersand by Martin Bauer, and colorful Helios type specimen.
Post-it notes began to fill my wall: I-N-K-&-S-W-I-T-C-H. A catenoid for I, an inky K, a sine wave for S, maybe a bookworm for W. I had enough concept to bring the catenoid into vector drawing software, and ten seconds into pulling ellipses around with anchor points, I asked: why am I doing this by hand? A computer is so good at drawing that kind of form. What would be more interesting than a static image was a tool, one that let you tune the density, the rotation, the position, the number of splines. A catenoid as a visualization, or print-ready for a t-shirt, or whatever it needed to be. That was the moment the idea formed: a typographic specimen of small machines. Letters that are tools.
An alphabet needs more than one tool. At our weekly show-and-tell, I shared the catenoid alongside the wall of doodles, and a prototype was born. We ideated on the spot, and the project became real almost instantly. It didn’t feel like a pitch. It felt like an invitation. That’s a rare thing: a lab full of researchers giving room and support to what is, at heart, an art project. Tenfold owes a great deal to the kind of place Ink & Switch is.
Ivan and I iterated together on the playground, a tool for making tools. I sketched the grid and the control surface, including a Lissajous wave for chaos mode that, when it falls in and out of sync, looks an awful lot like the harmonograph that started this whole thing. Ivan took that and built it into something real. He did most of the engineering and a lot of the project management, keeping me and the rest of us on track toward a shared timeline. I’m grateful for all of it.
From there, members of the Lab made letters as an end-of-year art project, and we later opened the playground up to friends of the Lab. The letters that came in surprised me at every turn: tools and animations and pure type and, in at least one case, a playable bullet hell game. I hadn’t imagined game engines as something a letter could contain. This is the payoff of building the tool: someone hands you back a thing you would never have made yourself.
Tenfold has been one of the most fun things I’ve made, and it’s just the beginning of the story. In an upcoming note, Ivan will tell the story of how the playground was built and all the weird little things people made within it. Stay tuned. x
Inspiration within arm’s reach.
On the wall:
On the desk:
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