Herman Martinus: Breathe Life Into Your Art And Create Minimal, Optimized Blog in 2024

Hackernews is a place where you will find content that will gratify one’s intellectual curiosity. It focusses on computer science and entrepreneurship. And that’s were Box Piper discovered Herman Martinus.

One of the posts in HN, “My product is my garden” has 650+ upvotes. It was on the first page of HN, a big thing for any creator/developer/maker. This post has a link to a blog written by Herman Martinus. (Post for all those who is into building products, this blog is a must-read).

But Who is Herman Martinus?

He’s currently working on a character posing tool for artists Just Sketch and the most minimal blogging platform ever, Bear Blog.

Let’s start with Bear Blog a minimal blogging platform

Bear Blog, is a no-nonsense, blazing-fast, privacy-first blogging platform. It doesn’t have any trackers, javascript, stylesheets. It is designed to be as minimalistic as possible and only cares for one thing, “Your words”.

In today’s world, there is a website obesity crisis. Websites are bloated with full of scripts, ads, and trackers which eventually impacts readability and left out from your well-crafted content. Bear Blog is optimised, fast and has tiny pages whose size are ~5kb in size. It can work on any device and super responsive. Google page speed score is now in your control and starts creating SEO optimised blog that not only you but also your reader and google likes to be with.

It’s built with Django/Python, HTML, CSS and hosted on Heroku.

It has a great discovery feature, which helps your blog to get features with other blogs and get some traction. If someone likes, they can raise a toast for you (an alternative to upvote and like button). To make it more human friendly and to enhance blogs discovery in an organic way, he came up with an algorithm:

Score = U / (T + 4) ^ G 
Where, 
U = Upvotes (toasts) of a post 
T = Time since submission (in hours) 
G = Gravity (currently at 1.2) to keep page content fresh.

Box Piper believes, as a creator who likes to write and create quality content, the focus on this formula is not too much. Only good quality content can sustain for any blog posts and nothing else. Readers and Google love quality content and in an easier and accessible format. Bear Blog is 🔥.

Let’s check out his next project Just Sketch

JustSketch is a free character posing tool for drawing, sketching, fashion design, comic illustration, exploring poses and lighting. It’s a reference tool on the web which will give depth to your characters with the best poses.

Imagination is the genesis of this app and how you can put life into your art. It’s beautiful.

When you open an app at app.justsketch.me, you will have a fully posable figures to draw your art on. Adjust the rotation of each joint for a natural pose of each of your characters. Create the perfect drawing reference for your art. You have a plethora of options to choose characters and styles, from anime to superheroes.

App has a feature to control the position, direction and intensity of the lights in your scene. Or remove them entirely. Move the camera around the scene for the perfect shot, with an adjustable field of view for an extreme perspective. From basic shapes to create any prop, you would need to add images to the scene as backgrounds or props, all are available in the app. It has well crafted preset poses for characters to get your up and making art in no time. It’s truly developed by artists for an artist.

JustSketch is built with ThreeJS / vanilla JS on Firebase. You can easily export posed models to .dae and .obj format.

Ending Note

Herman has created wonderful products. Blog Bear and Just sketch are created with the user’s pain points in mind. Blog bear is super amazing where someone can express it more clearly and feel safe from any trackers. And with Just sketch, an artist can start giving life to the characters. hfbmartinus[at]gmail[dot]com