About Doodly Doodle
Doodly Doodle is made by Simon Breslav, a computer scientist whose work has ranged from legal search engines and building simulation to data visualization, human–computer interaction and, today, building codes. Simon is the co-founder and CTO of Trax and builds Doodly Doodle in the evenings. Home is Toronto, shared with Simon’s wife and their young son.
Drawing first.
Before the code, there were drawings. As a computer science student at the University of Michigan, Simon self-published small ink comics in Ann Arbor (Lone Carrot, and You Suck at Programming, please stop!), contributed a comic to the student anthology empty pockets 2, and illustrated ten fairy tales for Charles Fleetham’s book The Search for Unrational Leadership. Ink and watercolor are still Simon’s favorite media.
The look of a hand-made mark.
Simon’s research began where drawing and computing meet: non-photorealistic rendering, the craft of making computer images look drawn and painted. At Michigan, Simon worked for Lee Markosian and published on stroke patterns and hatching, including “Dynamic 2D Patterns for Shading 3D Scenes” at SIGGRAPH 2007. After two years building Westlaw at Thomson Reuters, Simon joined the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto, earning an M.Sc. in computer graphics under Aaron Hertzmann in 2010, with an internship at Adobe’s Creative Technology Lab along the way.
A wide range.
Drawing was only the start. Simon spent ten years at Autodesk Research as a Principal Research Scientist, across simulation, graphics, human–computer interaction and information visualization: building performance and sustainability, a factory simulation engine for exploring lean manufacturing, generative-design metrics for pathfinding, visibility and acoustics, and an open-source simulation library. Along the way came more than 35 papers (one of them on a “photonic nose” for identifying bacteria) and 5 patents.
Today, as co-founder and CTO of Trax, Simon leads the design of a cloud platform for building codes and standards, with AI that helps check a design against them.
Twenty years, more or less.
The idea behind Doodly Doodle is older than all of that work. The first prototype was written in Java, the next in Flash, a later one in JavaScript. This one is in Swift, for iPad, iPhone and Mac. The tools changed; the idea stayed.
The process is part of the work.
Simon did not set out to make another drawing app. The aim is the satisfaction of physical painting (the feel of making a mark, watching it take shape, following it somewhere unexpected), together with something that could not exist without a computer.
In Doodly Doodle, that means a painting that can move. Motion belongs to the marks themselves, not to a separate animation process: there are no keyframes and no timelines. Just painting.
A quiet practice.
Simon practices Zen and serves on the elected board of directors of the Toronto Zen Centre. That practice shapes the app: drawing is a practice too, and it grows by coming back to it. Short daily exercises, a streak that forgives a missed day, and badges that mark how far you've come help make it a habit. The time spent painting should matter as much as the finished piece.
Doodly Doodle is still made the way it began: one evening at a time.