Alexander
Rulkens interaction designer creative coder explorer

Repper is a creative tool that helps designers and others to create their own patterns from images. The idea is to have an easy and fun way to design patterns, unlike the cumbersome and time-consuming tools currently on the market.

Repper has been sold to over 1500 people all around the world and is an inspiration for other designers, creatives and is used as an educational tool in many places.

Repper started from a simple idea, posed by a friend. The initial prototype was built in a couple of days. We released it and soon many blogs (including lifehacker) and boingboing) were talking about it. The feedback from this experiment gave us the confidence to develop it into a fully-featured tool.

We developed Repper with the focus on user experience and instant gratification. Designing should be fun and inspiring, so we made the interaction as direct and intuitive as possible. Users are encouraged to play with the pattern, to explore how an image can be transformed and to quickly try out a lot of different possibilities.

In the course of a year, Repper went from idea to product. We built a website around it and started selling it online. Although it was created for a specific niche market, we were surprised by the amount of people from different background who started using it in their creative process.

For me the most rewarding part of the process was the use of Repper in education. When promoting Repper we noticed how easy and fun it was for people without a design background to use Repper and to have fun with it. At one point, we got requests from a number of teachers and museums to use Repper for educational ends.

So we decided to give away Repper for free to educational institutions. Since then, over 2000 students have used Repper in the classroom, learning about creativity and mathematics in an amazingly fun way. I'm very excited about that!

Repper has been used by creative people from all sorts of different backgrounds. From fashion design to graphic design, DIY projects to education, the way that Repper is incorporated in creative processes inspires and delights me.