The Axonometric Calculator was originally built for a group of graphic design students. They’d been tasked with building projections of walls covered in typography for a museum exhibit. Unfortunately for them, the Calculator wasn’t finished that quarter, so they had to learn some trig.

The Calculator’s singular purpose it to generate an Adobe Illustrator Action file. Making the tedium of turning multiview drawings into projections a matter of three mouse clicks.

The prototype was built with Python and GTK, wrapped up in an InnoDB installer. But that’s 6MB of garbage wrapped around 90KB of code. So recently it’s begun its reincarnation as a web app.

As much as we love Python, we’ve ditched it for jQuery and some PHP to write the action file. We’re grateful for Matteo Bococchi’s mbContainersPlus plug-in, which allows us to have pretty things without any legwork.

While the new iteration is still in development, you can dink around with it here.