Hello! It’s the 5th of the month, and we are back at it again. We’ve been hosting workshops and building new products, but the past month was mostly swept up by Nikhil’s wedding.
The wedding took place at a summer camp over 2.5 days, and felt more like a festival than a traditional wedding. Jon was a groomsmen, gave a fantastic speech, and organized a college/frat-themed party on the first night that had Nikhil’s parents wearing college hoodies he didn’t know they owned.
As you might imagine, creative uses of technology were all over the place. Unique, personalized websites for every guest. Custom planning tools for Nikhil and his wife. Interactive 3D renderings of onsite areas to help with irl layouts and design. The list goes on.
Nikhil will share one example here today and follow up soon (after he gets over this change-of-seasons cough and cold!) with details on the rest.
“Hand” written notes for everyone!
My wife Vic is the master of small touches. If you’ve ever been to a Welcome to Chinatown event, you’ve seen for yourself how she’ll use small details, like a specific question to ask a table-mate placed in your welcome bag, to make you feel seen, and make your night memorable.
We wanted our wedding to be full of those, and we’d been discussing one in particular for months: instead of waiting for thank you notes, we wanted every single guest (even the babies) to get personal notes on their dinner plate on Saturday night’s big dinner.
However, writing 260 notes while also DIYing nearly every aspect of the wedding seemed like an unwise use of hands. We still wanted a hand-written feel, though, and when Vic borrowed two Cricut Maker machines for some of the sign and menu-making, we realized they could also be converted to pen plotters.
The lightbulb went off. Maybe we could get the pen plotters to write the letters with real pens while we multi-tasked.
We’d need to do the following:
Create handwriting
Test that the Cricut could, in fact, function as a pen plotter
Write the actual content of each note for all 260 guests
Convert the note content into my handwriting, in the file format + settings that the Cricut needs
Track which notes had been written and which ones still needed to be sent to the machine
From real writing → pen plotter
The first thing to test out: could my handwriting become a legible font that the pen plotter could use?
Tools like Calligraphr have been around a while to help create custom fonts. New AI models still suggest using Calligraphr (or similar programs) to get the initial baseline of letters, numbers, and punctation captured. Though, after going through this process, I’m not so sure any extra paid software is needed. Instead, what is definitely necessary to create your own handwriting is samples of:
All letters, upper and lower case
Numbers from 1-9 and some examples of longer numbers to capture spacing
Punctuation (though I skipped some of the unusual characters for this)
Paragraphs of writing - ask your agent to give you sample paragraph
Do these multiple times to capture some of the variance in your own handwriting
After capturing my natural handwriting, I used Astra (OpenAI’s new model) to first create a font, then refine it over and over. Along the way, when it knew that my ultimate goal was to use a Cricut to plot the script, it flagged something important:
Pen plotters trace the outline of a font. For it to look like real handwriting, we’d need to find the median line of the font for the pen to trace.
Taking the median made my handwriting look strange. However, with some backs and forth with Astra, we got to something that looked real.
I captured the process below:
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Creating the handwritten font required a process of back and forth to get it into shape for the pen plotter
Control the robots!
With my handwriting dialed in, I next needed a system for getting our personalized notes over to the Cricut in the right format. The Cricut has it’s own app, which has its own clunky UI that I was not ready to learn.
This seemed like a good time for Astra’s “Computer Use” abilities. In the GIF below, all of the actions you see are being taken by AI using my computer to control the Cricut software itself, instead of me needing to do that whole process on my own every time we did a print run.
We used Astra’s computer use capabilities to control the Cricut software, upload images, and change settings
With all of that — we were ready to print! The printing step remained manual — every run could print 4 sheets at a time on each machine, and I had to load the sheets onto the Cricut’s mat, then load the mat into the Cricut and press a couple buttons.
Once things were humming, it definitely felt a little bit like I was living in the future, with my little robot factory working alongside me.
A finished note for our littlest baby guest
Was it worth it?
Some of you haters out there might be thinking: “bro you could’ve just printed these with a printer and saved a bunch of time.”
Yeah, maybe. Aside from the custom-sized paper concerns, you’re probably right.
Some of you might’ve just sucked it up and written these out. Our wrists are too feeble for that… and Vic was entirely freed from any of this other than writing her allotment of messages in the spreadsheet, which let her focus on all of the other beautiful designs she was creating at the time.
This whole process took a long time — ~18-20 hours of printing time, spread out around 3-4 days. The net result, however, was both a set of artifacts the people loved and felt loved by, and a process that I get to write a newsletter about.
Computer use will get faster. The hardware will get more seamlessly connected to the software. Getting to stitch these processes together now will let me understand the changes that are inevitably going to be made down the line to make these kinds of irl software-assisted maker processes more streamlined. So, like many other things in life, given how much I learned along the way, it was 100% worth the effort.
A long-form piece for the road: We leave you with an unrelated long form piece for the road: A piece that Nikhil remembers reading back in 2009 that opened up a fascinating rabbithole about how flavors, smells, and tastes are synthesized. No need to dust off your organic chemistry for this one - the New Yorker will do it for you. Read The Taste Makers (2009) from Raffi Khatchadourian.
Till next time,
Nikhil & Jon