A first fitting

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A tailor's first fitting is held together with long, loose stitches. The garment is tacked just well enough to be worn once, looked at, and corrected before anything is cut for good. That stitch is called a baste, and this tool takes its name from it.

Baste makes interfaces the same way. It begins with a person, drafts loosely, holds the result up against them, and keeps what fits.

What a person is made of

Most design tools, when they ask about a user at all, ask for a demographic: an age bracket, a job title, a device. Baste asks what film this person rewatches, what plays while they work, which room they feel most themselves in, and what has quietly obsessed them for years.

Those answers are a persona, and three come built in.

Cyberbotanist rewatches Annihilation and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, listens to Biosphere and field recordings, spends time in greenhouses and herbariums, keeps a Raspberry Pi nearby, and thinks about mycelial networks and DIY microscopy.

Night Market Coder grew up on Chungking Express, runs on city pop and Haruomi Hosono, is most at home in convenience stores at 2am and densely packed arcades, works in Supabase and Figma, and photographs food and street signage.

Liminal Weeb lives in Serial Experiments Lain and Perfect Blue, keeps Macintosh Plus and The Caretaker on repeat, is drawn to abandoned malls and server rooms humming in the dark, still opens Photoshop CS2, and collects lost media.

These are written personas, not real people. They show the method: a greenhouse and a 2am convenience store should not get the same palette, and once you know which one a person belongs to, colour temperature, screen density and the shape of the icons stop being arbitrary.

From a world to a working interface

An aesthetic profile on its own is a moodboard. Baste turns it into things an interface can use: tokens for colour, type and spacing, icons and SVG components, images, textures and short motion loops, all generated from the persona's references and packaged together so a button, its hover state and the texture behind it belong to the same world.

Specificity and usability pull against each other. The Studio shows a persona wearing its own design, the same screen rendered in its tokens with contrast checks beside it. A liminal palette can be as washed out as a dead website, but body text still has to read. Tokens export in formats a codebase can consume.

Many drafts, then a choice

Baste does not produce one answer. It searches across colour temperature, visual density and abstractness, and keeps the best candidate in each region of that space: the warm dense corner, the cold sparse one, and the strange abstract draft that might be exactly right.

Each candidate is judged against the persona, with alignment weighing most, then visual quality, uniqueness, coherence and usability. The judge narrows the field. The final decision is yours, and the Taste tab records your verdicts and reasons for later rounds. Baste can propose a dozen plausible greenhouses. Only a person can say which one is theirs.

Try it on

Start with the toile at baste.love/toile. It is the Studio running entirely in your browser tab, with the three built-in personas and recorded example runs. Pick Cyberbotanist, open Generate, and watch a recorded run replay: drafts, judgements, and the eight images that survived from two dozen.

Nothing new is generated in the toile, your own personas draft prompts only, and everything but the files you download resets when the tab reloads.

Real generation runs through a Baste server configured with your own provider keys. The CLI installs from the repository, since the npm name belongs to an unrelated package:

npm install -g github:Diogenesoftoronto/baste
baste gui

The developer docs cover providers and configuration, and the guide walks through each tab.

This journal follows the work from here: fittings, materials, and what changes as the stitches get shorter.

Baste Journal

A first fitting

What a person is made of

From a world to a working interface

Many drafts, then a choice

Try it on