Dear reader,
(strong whiplash)
(ambient presence)
My name is Lu Wilson and I make things for computers.
(ambient presence grows)
While I do this, I post up little— I post up little clips and snippets of what I’m working on while I do this. Whatever I make, I share it, no matter how big or small it is, big or small, good or bad…
(is my recurring mantra)
I share everything openly. Doesn’t matter how big or small it is, big or small, good or bad… Doesn’t matter… if it’s good or not…
But it…
It wasn’t always this way…
Let’s go back… back to the start… This is the story of…
(ambient presence fades)
(silence remains)
When I was younger, I was very shy… very quiet… very careful… and very in-the-closet.
I played the trumpet. I did jazz. It was really fun. I could be loud. I could express myself.
But over time… As I progressed up the “grade” system, I fell out of love with it.
I felt the expectations around it increase. It wasn’t enough to be loud. I also had to be “good”.
I had a panic attack in my grade 4 exam and I stayed in the closet.
In secondary school, I joined the swing band, not the jazz band, but the swing band. And it was great.
None of us were any good, none of us were very studious, and it was all quite scrappy. And still, we had a lot of fun making a lot of scrappy sounds.
Then I got “promoted” to the jazz band, which was like the swing band but “better”, and it was completely different. Everyone was competitive, trying to show how good they were. You were mocked for your mistakes… they cringed when you messed up.
I stopped turning up to trumpet lessons. I stopped turning up to jazz band and I stayed in the closet.
For one reason or another, I got a ukulele.
I taught myself some simple chords and learned a few songs. My neighbour taught me some too. I liked Beirut.
Such a simple little thing, a toy instrument. It’s just a toy, it’s not supposed to sound good. That’s what I thought.
The only reason you play a ukulele is to have fun… and express yourself… not to sound good… or be impressive…
Obviously that’s not true… but it’s what I told myself to keep myself playing and I came out of the closet.
Sandspiel is a falling sand game where you can drop different elements like sand, water, dust, lava, and more. It’s fun watching the different elements interact.
But most people don’t use sandspiel as a falling sand game. It’s mostly used as a drawing tool… to draw drawings… paint pictures… and the like.
Why would they do that?
Why would anyone draw in a falling sand game? and not an actual drawing tool? like photoshop? or procreate? or pixlr? or even microsoft paint?
Or even on a piece of paper? or in a sketchbook? or on a canvas? (in the real world)
Why would they choose to draw in sandspiel?
The occasional commenter explains why: They’ve already tried those ‘real’ drawing tools. And it goes badly.
They can’t handle the pressure of the blank canvas, and the expectation to make something good. But in sandspiel, they feel free to draw to their heart’s content. And they feel free to share their work with the world.
The only reason you draw in sandspiel is to have fun… and express yourself… not to look good… or be impressive.
It’s hard to draw in sandspiel, and that’s why it’s easy to draw in sandspiel. It’s easy because it’s hard and I started taking hormones.
I left my teaching job to work on sandspiel with my good friend Max Bittker. We made it run better on chromebooks and phones.
Then we made a new tool called sandspiel studio that lets you make your own elements using a drag-and-drop programming language.
Similar to the main sandspiel, we wanted sandspiel studio to be a place where people come to draw stuff, not only to code. And we didn’t get it right at first.
When we first launched sandspiel studio, users only used it for coding. The creations were amazing, but it wasn’t what we were after.
We kept iterating and iterating. We added more and more example elements for people to draw with. We made video tutorials for people to follow. And Max told me something that surprised me.
“The video needs to be worse” he said.
“Why would it need be worse?” I wondered to myself.
Why would you make something bad on purpose?
Nowadays— It makes sense to me now. But at the time, I didn’t understand.
There was one change that made all the difference:
At some point, Max added silly little sounds that happen whenever you’re drawing.
The sounds are pleasing and playful, and they make it fun to just draw stuff and make squiggly lines.
They make you try out / test / investigate / try to figure out—
The sounds aren’t always the same. They change over time and they change with different brush sizes, so it prompts you— you get—
You end up drawing lines and different shapes, tapping dots with different—
And before you know it, you’re drawing.
We were pleased to see people create paintbrushes for themselves and I changed my name.
Me and Max lived in different countries so we did a long video call each week to catch up.
During the calls, we used tldraw to make shared notes and plans, to draw up diagrams, to communicate what we were doing, sharing screenshots and clips, and we ended up spending a lot of time in those tldraw rooms after the call was over, just drawing for fun.
If you didn’t know, tldraw is a virtual whiteboard. It lets you draw stuff. Diagrams, notes. That sort of thing.
And the whiteboard has an intentional scrappiness. The lines have a natural wobble. The text is wonky. The ink splodges. It’s impossible to get it looking “perfect”.
This makes you stop worrying about how neat or “perfect” your drawing is. Because you can’t do it. Because you can’t.
Instead, you feel free to “get on with it” and get your thinking down on the page, no matter how scrappy it is.
Peter van Hardenberg from ink and switch often tells me, “The fidelity of the tool should match the fidelity of the idea” when referring to tldraw. As in… He says tldraw is good because it’s low fidelity and that matches the fidelity of your— and I disagree, or at least, I mean— Maybe I agree, maybe I don’t. I don’t really care. But either way, it’s missing the point.
A low fidelity drawing can certainly be messy. But a low fidelity drawing can also be neat.
It’s not the fidelity that matters. You can make some extremely high fidelity drawings in tldraw. We see this all the time. But those high fidelity boards are still messy. They still have the same imperfect splodgy wobbles as every other tldraw creation.
These high fidelity drawings— The high fidelity drawings that people make in tldraw— These high fidelity drawings are not high fidelity despite being scrappy. They are high fidelity because they are scrappy: The tool’s looseness loosens up the person drawing. It lets them draw and draw and draw and—
Steve Ruiz saw some of my work(?) and invited me to the tldraw office.
On that day, he explained to me how the limited colour choices help to creatively unblock people. You stop worrying about picking and fine tuning the “perfect” colour. You just pick one and go.
People might ask for more colour choices, and members of the community do sometimes ask for this. And yes, they might think that they want that, but really they don’t. Or at least, they might want it but they wouldn’t want the paralyzing effect that comes with the burden of seemingly unlimited choice.
Being stuck with limited colour options can be frustrating. But it can also be the one thing you need to get you creatively unstuck.
Anyway, I joined the tldraw team and I decided that either’s fine: My name. Either name’s fine. Lu or Luke (either’s fine). It doesn’t matter.
I always loved—
Maywa Denki is an electronics company that makes nonsense machines, like Mr Knocky and Sushi Go and the infamous Otomatone.
These machines are bonkers. When you play one, it’s chaotic, it’s messy, it’s silly, it’s stupid, it’s scrappy. And despite being toy-like, they’re actually really hard to play. It often sounds quite “bad” when you play one.
Paradoxically, the otomatone (for example) is easy to play because it’s hard to play. It’s hard and this makes it easy. Because there’s no expectation to sound “good”.
The only reason you play an otomatone is to have fun… and express yourself… not to sound good… or be impressive…
I steadily grew my collection of toy instruments and nonsense machines. A stylophone, a slide whistle, a bigger ukulele! I mean, they’re not really toy instruments. They’re real instruments, but they’re sometimes incorrectly perceived that way: As unserious silly toys.
To me, this misperception is helpful. It takes the pressure off. It reminds me to have fun and “play”. Not “play” as in “perform” but “play” as in “play”. Anyway, I received an otomatone as a gift and I changed my pronouns.
The list goes on and on. Seriously, there are so many examples of—
So there I was. I thought I was an expert! Ha!
Yes, in my arrogance, I thought I had learned everything there was to learn about emotionally freeing yourself when you play / make music.
It’s ridiculous really, but I—
Yes, I thought I would put my learnings to good use and make a tool. I would make a single tool that captures and conveys my idea: My single idea that / about creativity and how to do it. Yes! It would be my greatest work / my finest piece to date: The latest radical mind altering substance straight outta the tode pond lab.
Little did I know…
Little did I know, I was about to be deeply humbled and changed by what happened next.
Normally it’s me. Normally I’m the one who’s telling other people to share scrappy fiddles, or more specifically, normalise sharing scrappy fiddles. But I’ve never told the story about how scrappy fiddles became normalised for myself: For myself, sharing scrappy fiddles wasn’t always normal.
I wasn’t born like this. No!
No! It’s something that happened to me and I increased my oestrogen dose from one patch to two.
Continued in part two.