jackxalan/blog/

NOODLING, TINKERING AND DOODLING

Jack Cummings • 04.28.24

I really like to noodle. Often, I'll have a random idea for a project with no real thought or intent behind why or where it should live, and yet… I noodle.

While this has been true of various projects of mine since high school, the noodling generally falls into two buckets: "art" and "web".

Doodling

In high school, I elected to skip Art class. Instead, I filled my time with band (an art) and television production (which also revolves around the arts). Obviously, I wasn't disinterested in the arts as a whole, as so much of my time was spent engaging and creating it; however, the traditional skills valued in a high school art class weren't taught in a way I could easily grapple week-to-week. As such, I can't say I ever really learned to draw, sculpt, etc.

When I got to college, after switching majors (from Archeology to Experience Design), I landed in even more "non-traditional" spaces in which to create art. I took a few theater classes, a digital art class, and some experimental classes that allowed me to really dig into installations that intrigued me, the kinds you might find in a... theme park, for instance. These classes are where I finally started to feel my own skills develop.

While I have never felt comfortable enough with those skills to put "artist" on a business card; the urge to sketch, to create, to learn and improve has never left me. Normally, these "doodles" are just random ideas I work out in Sketch and throw onto social media. But now, those ideas can have a home!

My wife, Ashley, has been a figure skater since childhood; looking at the blade of her skate one day, I had a random idea for a wordmark/typeface that was pretty easy to implement.

I spent many hours as a youngster in Scouts, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout. I probably spent as many (or more) hours playing Pokemon. This fake Scouting Merit Badge book was born of those two experiences.

Tinkering

Back to high school - the other major, defining force which reared its head in the late aughts was the rise of social media. Facebook, mySpace, and Twitter all really took off during my high school years, and this profoundly shaped my interests for the coming decade and a half.

On mySpace, as any millennial will excitedly tell you, we learned what an "a href" was. A basic understanding of HTML allowed you to express yourself with profile themes, art, etc. On Twitter, I found scores of tech reporters and artists that introduced me to the art behind many of my favorite tech products, which resulted in a newfound love of Apple's industrial design and Google's quirky, colorful interfaces. This fascination would result in a blog, which I ran for 4-5 years way back when, integrating Twitter and Tumblr as much as I could: POW Blogs.

One of the various logos/banners for POW Blogs, with which I lovingly referred to one of my favorite creative institutions of all time, a little gaming company based in Kyoto.

Twitter, along with (amazingly) POW Blogs, resulted in some really fun online connections through a community of fans of my then-favorite band, Family Force 5. As @jackozord, I was constantly engaging with band members, fans, and even... the band's PR rep? It was truly one of my favorite eras of the scene and the internet.

A decade (and what seems like a lifetime) later, I would jump into what has been one of my most fulfilling creative endeavours to date: PROJECT: DEXTER, where I learned how to build an iOS app with Swift to realize a childhood dream: Ash's Pokedex from the 90's Pokemon anime.

(But that's a story for a different time.)

A screenshot from PROJECT: DEXTER.

Noodling

Nowadays, all of those endeavours have landed in this: a website of my own that allows me to doodle, to tinker... to just generally noodle.

If I had a point here, I suppose it's this:

Don't let intimidating hobbies like art or engineering scare you from toying around with them. Creative and artistic expression come in many forms, and as long as the endeavor is for you, the resulting works will be fulfilling.

Create for yourself and no one else.

I would be remiss to end without pointing to LMNT, a blog written by an artist I discovered way back... in high school. Louie has designed for the Disney Parks and Apple, along with every notable desktop wallpaper that's been ripped off for the last decade. He posted about "Tinkering" in 2016, and much of this site comes from a principle he outlined in that post:

"You start with something that exists and you change it to understand it."