Designing Creative Tools

Designing Creative Tools explores how both physical and digital tools shape the creative acts they enable.

The book speaks to designers building the next generation of creative hardware, software, and interfaces, while also offering valuable insights to the wider design community seeking new ways to think about intention, control, and authorship. Creatives who use these tools, musicians, photographers, and artists will find inspiring stories behind iconic instruments from the Leica I to the TR-808, Blender, and early 3D printers.

With a clear framework and principles specific to creation, the book helps readers understand how creative tools work, how they guide their users, and how they can be reimagined.

Author

Guillaume Couche is the co-founder of London-based design studio Oh Hi Tomorrow, specialising in the design of creative tools. In 2013, he was part of the founding team of Gravity Sketch, a pioneering immersive 3D modelling application, and has since designed diverse devices for a wide range of creative fields, from music performance to sketching and filmmaking. In 2024, he was the co-recipient of a Red Dot: Best of the Best award for InSight, a futuristic photography camera. As a dilettante musician, film director and watercolourist, when he does not design creative tools, he uses them.

Sanya Rai is a Berlin-based Senior Interaction Designer at Google DeepMind who brings 15 years of experience in designing products across the physical-digital landscape, including Google Assistant, flagship Pixel phones and, most recently, the Gemini app. With a dual master’s degree from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, she blends technical rigor with creative exploration. She previously held senior roles at Designit and has worked with organisations such as BMW, Huawei, Telekom and Nespresso. Approaching the design process as a vital creative journey, she applies UX, strategy, and design research to build beautiful user experiences that simply make sense.

Richard Shackleton is the co-founder of Oh Hi Tomorrow and has spent three decades shaping creative tools through product design, strategy, and innovation. His work has influenced technologies central to Hollywood film and animation, and in roles at Avid, Foundry, Allegorithmic, Epic Games, and others, he helped develop products used by studios such as ILM, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Wētā FX, Pixar, Marvel, and Netflix. He also supports emerging creative entrepreneurs as an investor and advisor. Outside the studio, Richard’s interests include painting and scale model making, a reminder that the tools we create ultimately belong in the hands of makers.