Context, a new app created by a designer for designers, is poised to make it vastly easier and faster to realize and present visual concepts. With abbreviated deadlines and budgets becoming industry norms, the app could be a godsend, allowing designers to mock up various iterations of their ideas in record speed.

In its current desktop application for Mac, Context profoundly expedites artwork surface application while delivering photographic results. In seconds, designers can generate and view their work in real-looking, real-world contexts–e.g., test the brand’s name in a couple of fresh typefaces and colors in various locations on a flyposter, a wine label, or a hanger tag. That means no photographing or trolling for flat images to Photoshop, no switching between programs and windows, and fewer physical models. The designer can guess and prototype less while imagining and experimenting more.





Context is the brain child of Joshua Distler, a former lead packaging designer at Apple who has consulted for the likes of Ideo, Metadesign, and Wolff Olins. He also founded LiveSurface, a library of Photoshop image templates ranging from billboards to business cards, clothes, and bottles that was the first of its kind and destined to become an industry standard. For the past two years, though, Distler has been working covertly on Context.

Distler drew from his experience as an award-winning designer. At Ideo, a creative agency known for the “regimented openness” of employees’ idea-sharing, Distler learned by “touching” everything from print and packaging to interactive and product design while observing the efficacy of a prototype-test-prototype-repeat culture. At Apple, he practiced the brand’s “reductive perfectionism”: To find the most elegant solution “we’d iterate, iterate, iterate,” he recalls. “Both companies were wholly committed to the idea of ‘process makes perfect’ and to the belief that you can’t find the best idea until you’ve tried a lot of ideas.” Context tightens this feedback loop, not to eliminate iteration and experimentation but to make them fluid and fast.

LiveSurface went live with only 25 images when it launched in 2006; the release version of Context, which just went into beta invite mode, will have more than 300 surfaces. One post-launch priority for Distler will be adding more soon, using a set of proprietary authoring tools. He’s already secured four patents involving file structures, how to simulate inks and foils convincingly, and how to deliver imagery with embedded 3-D data.

“Flat is history,” as the Context website declares: These may be “surfaces,” but they’re deep surfaces. The structure of each contains a 3-D surface and multiple layers that control lighting, masking, shadows, and reflections. One specification dedicated to surface “softness” controls how deep a foil stamp will be imprinted. “We get obsessive,” Distler says.

Here, the designer gets into finer points of how Context solves five major workflow issues: