The Builder's Definition of Creative Tools
Tools that change how people think.
Work in progress: last updated 03/04/2025.
It would tempting to say that creative tools are simply the tools people use as part of their creative work.
This turns out to not be very useful. By this definition, the guitar and the guitar tuner are both creative tools. That’s an issue because you design the guitar tuner like any other product. It’s close-ended and used for a clear, specific purpose. In contrast, some simple analysis of the guitar reveals that it doesn’t really fit into the traditional ideals of good design1. To get closer to a useful distinction, we have to take a slightly different perspective and consider not what creative tools do for the user but what they do to the user.
What happens when you ask insiders about the most prominent tools and skills of their domain?
Essay writers tell you that writing is great because it changes how you think and helps develop clarity.
Coders say you should learn a programming language because it changes and improves your logical thinking.
Artists say that drawing changes how you see.
Musicians say that learning an instrument changes how you hear music.
The universal feature of creative tools is to change how you think in a way that's transformative. It’s only from the novice/outsider perspective that these learning curves seem purely inhibitive.
Now let’s consider some other noteworthy criteria.
Indefinite Usage
If you’re building a product to help people do novel work, then some aspect of every use case is unknown2. This topic will have its own post soon.
Generic and Open-Ended
‘Generic' is often used as a pejorative for products with too many features. Creative tools derive their value from the interaction effects between a relatively small set of features. As a result, they escape the one-to-one mapping of features and solutions.
Product Superset
A creative tool is not a product, it’s an abstract subset of a product. The product superset will also contain features and UX where counterintuition could only be inhibitive, and the usual design rules should therefore be applied.
Why Not Tools for Thought?
Some will observe that my base definition is imperfectly copied from inspired by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen’s work on tools for thought. So why don’t I use that phrase if it “has been widely used since Iverson’s 1950s and 1960s work introducing the term”?
Initially I was happy to abandon the baggage that comes with marketers’ abuse of creative tools. Unfortunately tools for thought seems to be most commonly used today in reference to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) software. Misuse of these terms seems unavoidable.
Fortunately, if you ask the average person for examples of creative tools, you should mostly get good answers. They will be biased towards art tools and overlook important answers like language, but this is fine with me because my own bias is similar.
Compared to the most thoughtful tools for thought people, I think there are two main differences in what I’m most interested in:
Much less attention to tools that take language as an input.
Less focus on computers and more focus on network effects.3
You can follow me on Twitter
Much of the purpose of this blog is to explore those unique challenges.
More specifically, every creative use case, familiar tools almost always become useful for non-creative work as well
I don’t mean to imply that couldn’t do both.