With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

A lot of people see software as a list of features, hardware as a list of specs. But when you think about how much time we spend with these things, maybe they just aren’t that utilitarian. We think of buildings not just as volumes of conditioned air — but also as something architected, as something that can have a profound effect on how you feel, something that can have value in itself (historical buildings and such).

software gives you its own set of abstractions and basic vocabulary with which to understand every experience. It sort of smells like mathematics in some ways. But software’s way of looking at the world is more about abstractions modeling underlying complexities in systems; signal vs. noise; scale and orders of magnitude; and information — how much there is, what we can do it with, how we can learn from it and model it. Software’s interpretation of reality is particularly important because software drives the world now, and the people who write the software that runs it see the world through this kind of “software’s worldview” — scaling laws, information theory, abstractions and complexity. I think over time I’ve come to believe that understanding this worldview is more interesting than learning to wield programming tools.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.

Not all design work is done in code, prototyping tools, or sketches. Likewise, not all engineering work is done in code or technical diagrams. Natural language, text, and conversations should be some of your primary mediums for creative work.

one of the most important sub-skills for writing and conversation as a design medium is learning how to create great analogies. Douglas Hofstadter thinks that analogies are actually the core of cognition, which I buy.

the web has some amazing advantages for launching new projects, which include (but aren’t limited to): Super fast distribution and updates Cross platform Huge tooling ecosystems Enormous, worldwide community If you’re into games, awesome! If you’re into mobile or native development, that’s cool too. There are lots of platform-specific toolkits and environments to make those. There’s also a lot of effort in creating cross platform tools and community-driven projects for both domains (like Unity and Flutter). They all have their advantages, but to me, nothing beats the portability and speed of launching new websites and using web tech to get ideas out the door.

using web tech for 80-90% of my projects has a lot of skill transfer effects. Since I’m using similar tools for lots of different projects, I can still refine my core skillset no matter what I’m making. If I’m making a drawing tool concept, a game, or a text editor— I’ll can still probably build all three with React. Of course there are specific libraries or APIs I might need to learn to make each kind of project, but there’s enough in common between all the projects that I can focus on the new content instead of yakshaving and deliberating over unnecessary details.

There are also market pressures that imply focusing on web will have long term payoff, like the rise of wasm, new browsers, and collaborative apps becoming the norm.