Illustrations Become Software When the Tooling Is Custom
custom illustration tooling maps to joelclaw visual explainers as source artifacts, not decorative screenshots
Dan Hollick shared a short X video about how he makes some of the illustrations for Making Software. The interesting bit isn’t just the art. It’s that the illustrations have tooling behind them.
That turns visual explanation into something closer to software: repeatable, tweakable, and shaped by a system instead of a one-off screenshot. For technical writing, that’s the whole damn game. The drawing is part of the argument.
This maps cleanly to joelclaw and its cool discoveries pipeline. If diagrams, demos, and explainers are generated from structured inputs, they can be reviewed, rebuilt, versioned, and reused instead of rotting as static images in a folder.
Key Ideas
- Dan Hollick frames the Making Software illustrations as something produced with custom tooling, not just manual design work.
- Custom visual tooling makes explainers more like code: repeatable artifacts that can evolve with the underlying idea.
- For joelclaw, this reinforces the pattern of treating visual explainers, diagrams, and discovery pages as rebuildable system outputs.
- The useful move is capturing the toolchain, not only the final image, so future agents can inspect and regenerate the work.