Doodles, Distortion, and Elaborate Intros

And alpine cheese, of course.

Oct 11, 2024

Sketchy Replies ✏️

This newsletter hit two milestones this month — turning a mighty one year of age, and amassing 200 readers.

To celebrate, I’ve made a microsite called Sketchy Replies: A Non-AI Image Generator.

While giant server farms burn through the planet’s finite resources to create AI images, Sketchy Replies is powered by… me (so mostly Pringles and bread).

Three simple doodles of things like monkeys riding on dinosaurs, rocks with googly eyes, and cows. — Three examples. You too could own an astonishing piece of art like this for free.

That’s right — enter a prompt of your choosing, and you’ll get emailed an artistically dreadful doodle from me, like the ones that accompany this newsletter.

Try it out here. It’s free. Tell your friends.

Lovely free fonts ✨

Collletttivo is an open-source type catalogue, and every typeface or font is of outstanding quality. Apfel Grotezk and Ortica are my favourites. Here’s an example poster I put together with them:

A colourful abstract poster representing cheese with holes, captioned with "Alpine Cheesefest 2025, Zurich, CH." — Sadly, Alpine Cheesefest isn’t real. The closest thing I could find was this, though 🧀🇨🇭

If that’s not enough, Collletttivo also offers a fantastic collection of design resources, many of them also open-source and free to access.

Wibbly Wobbly Stuff ∿

Endless Tools allows you to mangle your images through a selection of customisable filters. See my before and after below:

An animated comparison showing a simple poster with a large lowercase letter A, and the same design being heavily distorted into an animated liquid-like mass of tendrils.

While the results are often dazzling, the controls and customisation are reassuringly intuitive. There are four modes for you to play with, including some 3D effects too.

And sure, other tools may offer more precision, but with such a low barrier to entry, it’s perfect fun for anyone who loves distortion effects.

If you were born before 2000, you’ll likely recall websites with 10-second Adobe Flash intros, accompanied by a cacophony of tinny sound effects. While it’s good that we’ve moved past the ‘skip intro’ era, I miss the creativity in those elaborate, gaudy designs.

Thankfully, the landing page for Amo, an alternative social media company, satisfies this craving. With smooth, mind-bending animations, it fully embraces the youthful, energetic vibe of their products — and looks fantastic on any device.

Thanks for reading

Hope you enjoyed this month’s little collection of cool things. I’m especially looking forward to doodling random stuff for you, and I’ll likely share a few of my favourites next month.

I hope you have a great October, and see you next time,
Tom 🐢

If you're enjoying these emails, feel free to forward this to someone who might also appreciate our little corner of the internet!