Joshua Distler's Context software allows designers to see their concepts in real-world environments while they design. Image: Joshua Distler The Mac app works in tandem with Adobe Illustrator so designers can see their designs take on life-like forms in real time. Image: Joshua Distler The Context Surface Store features more than 350 3d surfaces that designers can choose from. This includes bags, billboards and bottles, to name just a few. Image: Joshua Distler The software instantly analyzes artwork and wraps it around the chosen surfaces in a couple of seconds. Image: Joshua Distler From the beginning of the creative process, Context gives true-to-life environmental, textural and material context to designs. Image: Joshua Distler The goal of Context is to radically reduce the time and effort it takes to realize a fully-developed design, which in turn will allow designers to focus more on brainstorming great ideas and less time on the mechanics of bringing them to life. Image: Joshua Distler Live Inks allow designers to simulate metallic foils, silk screening, embossing and more all from Illustrator, using the standard inks swatches palette in combination with Context. Image: Joshua Distler The Live View window is a floating window that floats over the Illustrator art board to allow users to see their artwork rendered photo-realistically while they work in Illustrator. Image: Joshua Distler "Plus Surfaces are resized proportionally and in 3D. Maybe the angle isn't right, or the designer wants to walk around their packaging idea? Plus Surfaces can be rotated in 3D space in realtime," says Distler. Image: Joshua Distler "Different inks handling light and shadow differently. Some inks, like fluorescents, actually emit more visible light than they receive," says Distler. "Factor in hundreds of artwork objects and simulating something like this in Photoshop wouldn't even be a consideration. Context does this in near realtime. And all of the lighting and compositing factors are adjustable with a few sliders." Image: Joshua Distler A mocked-up billboard in real-world context. Image: Joshua Distler The idea that iterating is the key to successful design pushed Distler to create a tool that would make it easier for all designers to work under Apple’s prototype-to-perfection mind frame. Image: Joshua Distler Distler hopes Context will fundamentally change the way designers work. Image: Joshua Distler

For most designers, coming up with ideas is easy. The hard part is transforming those ideas from creative kernels into believable prototypes, and doing it quickly. Even with computers, the process has always been pretty drawn out, requiring multiple steps on the computer, switching software programs and even building physical models to get a result that oftentimes doesn’t look quite how you originally envisioned it. “I was doing a lot of print and packaging work and it was always difficult to communicate the physicality of a package, signage or even just a business card,” says Joshua Distler. “There was a lot of printing and plotting and cut and pasting happening.”

>Context vastly reduces the time it takes to create a photorealistic prototype.

Distler, a former designer at Apple and IDEO, figured there had to be a way to make this workflow—the process of going from idea to prototype mock up— easier and more efficient. Unfortunately, there wasn't. So over the past couple of years, he’s been developing Context, an app for Mac, available today at 2pm EST, that will allow designers to mock up their designs and see them in real-world environments faster than ever before.

At its core, Context encourages hyper-efficient iteration by allowing designers to see their work three-dimensionally as they’re in the creation process. The goal is to radically reduce the time and effort it takes to realize a fully-developed design, which in turn will let designers spend more time on brainstorming great ideas and less time on the mechanics of bringing them to life. “The idea is that designers can figure out what works and what doesn’t while they’re brainstorming,” Distler says. “The idea that 'process makes perfect' is really just about testing a lot of ideas quickly and throwing out the ones that don't 'have legs.' Context is about making that prototyping process as fluid and fast as possible.”

So imagine that you need to mock up the cover of a book, and you’re on a tight deadline. Context works in tandem with Adobe Illustrator, which allows designers to visualize their ideas on a remarkably realistic 3-D book form with just a click of a button. Technically speaking, the way it works is this: Users pick out a 3-D surface or environment, whether that be a t-shirt, box or book cover, drag and drop it into a folder and click “edit” to open it in Illustrator. The designer can then apply their concept to the surface and the artwork is analyzed by Context and wrapped around the surface in just seconds. Boiled down, Distler describes it as an usual combination of 3-D technologies, 2-D compositing and some 2.5-D techniques, but really all you need to know is that it vastly reduces the time it takes to create a photorealistic prototype.

Before launching Context, Distler created LiveSurface, a library of more than 350 Photoshop image templates that allow designers apply their designs onto various 3D-rendered objects like bags, posters and books (all of the LiveSurface library is directly connected to Context). And before LiveSurface, Distler spent time as a packaging designer at Apple and IDEO. Both places left a lasting impression on the designer, who credits his experiences with the companies as the inspiration for Context. “Aside from the fact that I doubt I'd be a designer at all without Apple, and the fact that it was generally such an inspiring place to work, what I take from Apple is what I think most take from Apple: look what happens when design and engineering work as a single force,” he says. “IDEO and Apple were both hugely into prototyping, though at IDEO it was prototyping, with a capital 'P.' Both companies believed that to get something right you had to try a lot of different things, and after you'd tried a lot you had try a lot more.”

>"It's inevitable that designers will be more involved in inventing their own software.”

This ethos, the idea that iterating is the key to successful design, pushed Distler to create a tool that would make it easier for all designers to work under Apple’s iterate-to-perfection mentality. “Design thinking is all about breaking problems into their components and looking for interesting, unique ways to solve problems, so I think designers are natural tool makers,” he explains. “Every creative medium has always had a component of invention and toolmaking that pushes the medium forward. So, in some ways design is unique in that we work with the tools that we are given. It's inevitable that designers will be more involved in inventing their own software and even hardware.”

Context comes loaded with features that will make certainly make designers’ lives easier, though Distler pinpoints a few that he think will be particularly important. The Live View window, a window that floats over the Illustrator art board, allows users to view their artwork rendered photorealistically in real time as they work. Live Inks will allow designers to simulate metallic foils, silk screening, embossing and more effects. “What would take hours to create in Photoshop manually can be rendered by Context in a couple of seconds and fine-tuned in less,” he says. Likewise Plus Surfaces, pulled from the LiveSurface store, gives designers the ability to resize their surfaces to a precise size for their concept. “Unlike image stretching, Plus Surfaces are resized proportionally and in 3-D,” he says. “Maybe the angle isn't right, or the designer wants to “walk around” their packaging idea? Plus Surfaces can be rotated in 3-D space in realtime.”

Context's functionalities seem pretty "duh" when you see them on paper, almost as though all of this should have been possible long before now. But that sentiment is often the mark of an app that could fundamentally change in the way designers work. Or at least, that's what Distler is hoping. He believes Context isn't just about making life easier for designers—it's about making their lives easier so they can get better at doing what they're supposed to do, which is designing. "This project has always been largely about providing something useful to the design community," he says. "I love this idea that by making something that other designers can use, I am able to, in a sense, help create more beautiful and varied work than I could ever create myself."

Context, which is available at 2pm EST on Oct 29th, starts at $9 per month or $89 yearly for unlimited access to the Surface Store. A free trial gets you a handful of high-res surfaces.