Finally—A Calculator for Designers: Here’s Why It Matters
The story of why we made Sizey—Aspect Ratio Calculator
Hi! 👋 I’m Meritt — human, maker, and designer.
Designers love solving problems. We’re really good at it. The only problems we hate solving are usually math problems. This is the story of how I removed math from my daily life as a designer, and how you can too.
⚡️ TL;DR ⚡️
Design or Die Trying ❤️ 📐
Like most of you, I didn’t become a designer to do math.
I became a designer to create beautiful things, solve hard problems, and make the world a better place. I became a designer to do what I love. Yet, multiple times a day, every day, I had to do something I hated—solve math problems.
This wasn’t what I had in mind when I signed up to be a 👏 DE-SIGN-ER 👏. If I wanted to do math for a living, I would have become an accountant or something — am I right?
Whatever I was designing — posters, websites, apps, social media banners, it didn’t matter — the problem was always the same. I needed to do a little bit of math, multiple times a day. Every day. I was constantly being interrupted by something I hated, and it was killing my creative spirit.
Almost all of us experience some form of this, and as a result, most of us have become increasingly good at avoiding math at all costs. Why? Because it’s easy to avoid the things we hate doing. So, we come up with creative ways to avoid doing math in any way that we can. Usually this means we do weird, desperate things like using a design tool as some kind of hack-y calculator.
For example, if we need a 16:9 rectangle that is 375px wide, we might do something like draw a 16px by 9px rectangle, lock the constraints, set the width of the rectangle element to 375px, hit Enter, and hope for the best.
Sometimes this works. Most of the time though, this results in some horrible, half-pixel nonsense that we need to round out to a whole number anyway. These kinds of workarounds are messy, annoying, and unnecessary.
No bueno.
A Timeless Dilemma ⏳
Art and Science — the dividing halves of the universe.
You can be good at one or the other, but not both. That’s what most of us are led to believe anyway. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The problem is, as designers, math is not our job. And it shouldn’t be. Just because we have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean we should, or that we even want to.
Don’t get me wrong, I have seen some beautiful math. In all its scientific glory, math has changed the world for the better, and without it, we wouldn’t have things like modern medicine, spaceships, or design tools.
But — math is NOT the problem we are trying to solve. We’re solving behavioral problems. Emotional, human problems. We do things that no computer or math equation can do. Our superpowers—empathy and intuition—help us make critical design decisions, and we would be lost without them.
Every day, we stare at a blank page. We are faced with the beautiful, painful task of creating something from nothing.
Whether we’re designing the interface of an app or defining the optimum user flow of a website, what we’re really doing is always the same. We are stepping into the shoes of others, to solve problems. We simulate worlds, and role-play a spectrum of emotions. We play these mental games and scrutinize every detail—all day, every day, to make life easier for people we might never meet.
At any given time, we’re juggling thousands of tiny decisions, to solve thousands of tiny problems, to create a beautiful, singular, selfless solution to all of them. This is really hard to do, and it takes almost everything out of us. The last thing we need is to be interrupted by math problems.
Example:
“What should the height of the video be to make it 16 by 9..?”
“How wide should it be if it’s 4 by 3?”
Yuck.
Whether it was trying to find a pen for the hundredth time, scribbling on some Post-It notes, walking to the printer to get a piece of scratch paper, performing some crude calculations in the Spotlight search bar, pulling out a calculator app on a dying phone, or literal “napkin math” — I thought this is ridiculous.
Math was getting in the way of what I loved and what I was good at. I knew there had to be a better way. A magical ‘something-or-other’ that could solve all of these math problems for good.
Math should never be an obstacle of creativity.
Left Brain. Right Brain.
Enter Context Switching — the modern, cognitive plague.
Not so surprisingly, the more times your brain has to switch from one task to another (especially when said tasks use different sides of your brain), the harder it is to focus and the less productive (and happy) you will be. These kinds of small interruptions add up over time and will cost you some serious creativity, energy, and output.
Creativity requires freedom from distraction.
I knew that if I was struggling with these problems, chances are, other people were too. ❤️
Reinventing the Calculator
Solving a creativity problem with science.
The math to calculate the dimension of anything, based on an aspect ratio and a single dimension, is actually not that difficult. This usually involves cross-multiplication — a simple, multi-step algebra equation. While this is something you probably learned in grade school, this sequence of simple equations is really difficult to do in your head.
To make things worse, standard calculators are really bad at multi-step calculations (16/9)(X/320), especially when a variable (Y) is involved. There are some tools online that can do this, but they are often frustrating to use, and they are not made with designers in mind.
Luckily, one of my best friends is something of a math prodigy, and wouldn’t you know it, a developer. I called him up and pitched a ‘calculator app’ to him.
He laughed.
Joubin, being the math genius he is, thought the idea of building a custom calculator that could solve only a single type of equation was absurd, but after much discussion, he agreed to help.
The goal was simple. Take the two things I had — a ratio and a width — and math-magically get the third thing I was missing — the height. For this, we built a custom calculator, made just for designers. To solve all of our annoying ‘designer math’ problems once and for all. A beautiful, easy-to-use, ‘something-or-other’ to help you create without distraction, and with any luck, help you smile more often.
With that (after a lot of hard work) Sizey was born, out of creative desperation, to solve a very specific problem — a math problem.
You design. We’ll math.
We’re doing the math, so you don’t have to. With the help of our app Sizey, we hope to improve your concentration, speed up your workflow, and give you the ability to focus on what really matters. We want you to create without interruption and get back to doing what you do best. Designing.
We hope Sizey will help you be a little less distracted, and do what you love a little more often. Now…
Go create—without the math.
TL;DR ⚡️
To all of you who love to create…
We made a Mac app to calculate aspect ratios and do math, so you don’t have to. Sizey was born out of personal desperation. As a designer, I was tired of math getting in the way of what I loved — solving hard problems and helping people. I hope that, not only for myself but for all of you out there who struggle with math in their daily life, that Sizey can help you do what you do best — design.
So, do it for you. Forget the math and ride your creative wave. Focus on your work and create without interruption. Design on, friends.
You deserve this. ❤️
✨ Check out our website → sizey.app
💌 Or just say hello → @sizeyapp on Twitter
Want more? Read about how Joubin and I made Sizey, the stumbling blocks we faced, the learning curves along the way, and our list of tips & tricks for building a mac app of your own.
