A tool for drawing shapes on a grid of circles, in the manner of Armin Hofmann's exercises.
In his Graphic Design Manual (1965), the Basel designer Armin Hofmann presents a series of variations built on a grid of dots: shapes are born by joining circles with tangent lines, switching the direction of rotation each time. It is a system of remarkable economy — a circle, a straight line — that yields an endless family of silhouettes which all belong together. This tool takes that system and hands it to a rubber band: you circle a few dots, the band tightens and becomes an exact path of tangents and arcs.
I'm eulst, a motion designer based in Paris. I built this tool to redraw my logo; it turned out to be far more fun than that, so I'm sharing it. @eulst on Instagram.
Preparing the JPEG…