← Back to Kevin's newslettersPublished: 2025 Aug 31

Hi friends,

I’m coming through New York City September 29 – November 3. I’m putting together an Erdős-ish itinerary, so if you’ve got a juicy programming / CAD / design problem, a sofa, and want to collaborate for a day or two, drop me a line!

A simple powered-air respirator for woodworking

I wanted an integrated, minimal-faff PPE setup with ear protection, eye impact protection, and respiratory protection that I could use for woodworking while wearing my regular eyeglasses. 3M has an awesome “Versaflo” system which starts at about $1650, but that’s a bit steep for a casual hobby, so I paired its helmet ($225) with $50 worth of stuff from AliExpress and a bit of 3d-printing to make my own version:

Check out the full writeup and bill of materials on my website.

Why I shop via print catalogs in 2025

While shopping online for hardware to build my flatpack bed (exciting conclusion next month!), I was reminded that typical web designers have an extreme phobia of information density.

If you are shopping for any kind of specialty hardware — in my case screws and threaded inserts — I recommend skipping the manufacturer’s website and shopping via their print (PDF) catalog instead. It’ll probably have more detailed comparisons between product lines and their options and will be faster to navigate quickly. (The search is “local-first”, as the kids say.)

If there is no catalog, try having an LLM condense the anemic page 1-of-17 e-commerce website slop into a spreadsheet.

I meant to jot a quick note for the newsletter, but it quickly got out of hand, so I published it separately: Why I shop via print catalogs in 2025.

If you’ve never seen a catalog before, here’s a taste of the sort of information-dense (meta!) graphic design you might find within them. But be warned: Once you’ve tasted such sweet knowledge, you will be upset at 95% of e-commerce websites.

You have any favorite layout systems?

Back in 2016 I was working on a graphic design app with an integrated layout engine, and during that project I was extremely chuffed to develop a conceptual model that unified whitespace/margins/alignment with element sizing. This simplified both the designer-facing model we needed to teach, as well as internal implementation we needed to build— instead of juggling lots of specific terms like “margin-left” and “width”, we used the horizontal/vertical-neutral terms “axis”, with elements having “before/size/after”. (More details in this talk.)

Anyway, now that I’m designing my own lil’ CAD system I’m thinking about all this stuff again, and I’m curious if you’ve seen any particularly expressive or well designed layout schemes, or detailed reviews of classics like Illustrator’s align and distribute tools.

Some example scenarios I’d love to express succinctly and clearly:

I’m particularly interested in implementation prior art leveraging pattern matching and algebraic data types. A big open question in my mind is whether it’ll be simpler and faster to:

  1. express such layout constraints in a way that can be calculated directly (e.g., centering an object is done by calculating initial_spacing = (total_space - item_size) / 2),
  2. deal with abstract/general constraints and solve them numerically

We’ll see!

Misc. stuff