graphite (formerly known as illa) was originally a research project at Moving Brands in around 2015-16 where we investigated different approaches to drawing with computers.
We knew that nothing can really improve on the simple joy of pencil and paper which is the ultimate creative tool. User-friendly, collaborative, and shareable and don't need to be recharged. Software drawing tools back in 2014/15 offered convenience but they also felt quite cold and digital, cluttered with options and very focussed on productive goals like note-taking.
With that in mind, rather than creating a perfect physical simulation illa evolved into a project to understand whether digital tools could help people feel as if they are working with materials that have behaviours. A nice way to do this is to create a particle simulation which often has the benefit of being highly configurable, meaning you can simulate many different materials, including ones that don't exist in the real world.
Fifty Three's wonderful Paper app explored some of the same ideas, obviously with far more success and we are happy to see the app is still going strong today.
Over a year we made a large number of prototypes, many of which are irretrievable, but we wanted to save a copy of the pencil-rendering library. The code has been gently looked after and upgraded, and now been migrated to a new codebase written in Typescript and bun.
This project has this has been forked from the original and moved over here so that it can be shared freely with anyone who is interested, and occasionally maintained and improved.
Credit to Karsten Schmidt who made the first version of this tiny pencil-simulating particle engine.
We never knew what to do with this project, but we did have a lot of fun taking a prototype to test in a workshop at Internet Age Media in Barcelona.
Back then collaborative creative apps were far less common; we built a realtime multiplayer version of this canvas that allowed many workshop participants to share drawings together.
One of the most rewarding parts of our experimentation was paying attention to how graphite actually behaves on paper. So we built a custom rig for microscopic filmmaking. Graphite is a fascinating material which behaves quite strangely when you look closely; it definitely has a personality; almost skidding across the surface of paper.
