The studio

Tools for people, not instead of them.

Nombru & Co. is my studio in Portland, Oregon. The test every project here has to pass is whether the person is still the author once the tool has done its part.

Great Hearth, a household operating system, counts an empty list as a win and never nags — it carries the invisible work of running a home so the people in it have more room to live there. In KinoGlyph the machine is the brush and not the artist. The person picks the footage and directs the piece, and the tool draws it. On the Raspberry Pi, the local model advises and never decides — what runs unattended overnight is the deterministic half of the job, and the calls that need a person wait for one. Three projects, one rule underneath them. The machine takes the legwork. The person keeps the judgement.

I didn't come to any of this from outside the making. Radio and the signal chain behind it came first, then art and design, then a camera and a roll of film, and software underneath all of it now. I've made things in each of them, and got things wrong in each of them. That is how I know which parts of making a thing are genuinely tedious and which parts are the entire reason to do it. A tool that confuses the two is worse than no tool.

The method matches the position — my judgement on top, the machine doing the passes that don't need it. That habit came out of nearly fifteen years spent between the people using a thing and the people building it, where a confident wrong answer costs somebody else their business. I still build things that compound. But compounding only earns its keep when it hands something back. A process that runs itself overnight is worth the trouble only if it returns the morning to the person who used to spend it. I'd rather you could fix your own typo at eleven at night than have to email me about it, so I build sites their owners can still edit.

The studio is for small businesses and for people who make things — Portland and the Pacific Northwest first, anywhere in the US if the fit is right. What frightens someone about their own website is almost never the design. It's the cutover — the day the domain, the DNS and the email all have to move, and the site has to still be there afterwards. That part is routinely handed back to the owner to do alone, at the exact moment they have the least reason to feel confident about it. I ran support for a domain registrar at Squarespace, so that day doesn't read to me as the frightening part of a project. It reads as the part with a checklist.

Nombru started as a Dungeons & Dragons character, a dozen years back — a wizard I played so close to my own ideology that the line stopped mattering. At every table he was the one asking questions: about the town, the stranger, the history nobody else thought to check. He outlived his campaigns; in the worlds I run now he turns up as the sage in the tower, the wizard who keeps the library. So when the studio needed a name — and the machine it runs on was already called Nombru's Library — the name had been mine for years.

The range

• Radio
• Design
• Photography
• Software