About

Charactir is one person. The name has covered graphic design since 2018 and software since rather more recently, and this site is the first time both have lived in the same place.

The design half is identity, print and web: logos and letterheads for small businesses, a stamp issue for the South African Post Office, invitations and books and a laundromat wordmark with a peg clipped into it. The art half is mostly built rather than drawn: rendered scenes, brand characters modelled and rigged to stand up at full length, a game environment made prop by prop. The software half is small tools that solve a problem I actually had: a camera that corrupts its own image, a memory trainer built on what the research says rather than what feels right, a music-library cleaner that runs on your own machine because a library is thousands of files and uploading it somewhere is the wrong shape of solution.

The through-line is narrower than the list of disciplines suggests. Flat colour, one line weight, and a decision you have to commit to before it is printed. It is a way of working that came out of print and survived contact with everything else.

On AI, and what is mine

I use AI in my work, and I would rather say so plainly than have it be something you wonder about. It is a tool I direct, the way a camera or a renderer is, but it is a tool with a particular capacity to blur who did what, so it is worth being specific.

The ideas, the judgement and the decisions are mine. What a piece is for, what it should look like, what is good enough, what gets thrown away. Every choice you can see on this site was made by a person, and the ones I could not settle by measuring, I settled by looking.

Where AI did the making, the piece says so. Not as a disclaimer at the bottom, but on the work itself, describing what it actually did: generated, assisted, upscaled, wrote the first draft of. Vague credit is worse than none, because it lets you assume either too much or too little.

This website is an example. It was rebuilt with an AI coding assistant working from a plan I wrote and reviewed at every stage. The words are mine or edited by me, the design decisions are mine, and the artwork is entirely mine and predates all of it. The code was largely written by the assistant, under direction and review. That seems worth stating on the page rather than leaving you to guess.

None of the older work involved AI at all. The design and illustration here was made between roughly 2013 and 2018, by hand, in Illustrator, InDesign, Blender and a camera.