Visualizing My Ink Collection

I’ve been thinking about a better way to browse my ink collection than just scrolling through a long list of names. While the ink database can be searched by color and there are recommended similar inks on each ink page, I wanted a way of viewing the whole collection at once.

To solve this, I built an interactive Ink Color Wheel.

It maps my ever-growing collection of hundreds of different inks into a searchable, interactive space. You can toggle between plotting them by Hue and Saturation (the classic wheel view) or Hue and Lightness.

If you’re looking for a specific “vibe”—say, a very desaturated, moody teal or a high-chroma, punchy orange—it’s much easier to find by its position in color space.

How to use it:

• Hover over any dot to see the ink’s name and a quick color preview.
• Click a dot to “lock” it and highlight its nearest neighbors in the sidebar.
• Search by name or maker to highlight specific groups.
• Toggle the background between dark and light to see how the colors pop differently.

It’s been a fun way to rediscover some older bottles that had fallen out of rotation. If you’re an ink nerd like me, go have a play with it and let me know what you think.

From Handwriting to Font

I spend a lot of time writing on paper with different pens and inks, but almost all of my actual work happens on a screen. I decided I wanted to bring my own handwriting onto the screen as well, so have built tools (with help from GitHub Copilot) to create fonts from my handwritten script. How else better to bring the different character of quality pens into the digital experience?

The Process

To do this right, I needed a reproducible pipeline to build a font from scans of handwriting. Drawing vector paths by hand in font editing software for hundreds of letters and alternates isn’t sustainable for me. I built hw2font, a local Python tool that automates the conversion from a scanned template to a compiled OpenType font.