A Tool for Visual Research

A visual research tool that lays out a collection of images by how they look.

Strategy
Identity
Applications
Production

Fielder's Similar view: 3,505 images clustered by likeness on black, with the collection row along the top and the search bar below

Fielder lays out a collection of images by how they look, so a body of work can be read by likeness, color and the terms you set. It runs in the browser, and images stay there until you publish them.

Similar, Color and Recent

The loading screen: a green rabbit over a grid of grayscale images, with FIELDER in a capsule and VISUAL RESEARCHER beneath — Loading screen

Brief

Visual research means reading many images at once: what recurs, what clusters, and where the outliers sit. A folder shows them one at a time, sorted by name and date. The tools that sort images by look keep the collection on their own servers.

Approach

Fielder started as a local-first take on the self-sorting library designed at SOOT. CLIP runs in a worker inside the browser and embeds each image as it arrives, and the library is stored in IndexedDB, so a collection stays on the machine it was made on until it is published. The examples are laid out ahead of time and arrive as thirteen sprite sheets, so a map of 3,505 images opens without running the layout in the browser or fetching thousands of files.

Outcome

Three views arrange the same collection: Similar places images by likeness, Color fans them around the color wheel, and Recent orders them by arrival. Groups found on the map are named with what they hold, a count, the sources and the years, and a group opens as its own map. Search takes words, a named color, or an image to find more like it, and brings Are.na images straight onto the map.

Images come in from files and folders, Are.na, YouTube, Figma, Instagram and links. 3,505 open works come with it, 3,186 of them from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open access collection, and they stay in place after the first import. Live at fielder.pages.dev.

Client: Codex Foundry
Sector: Product
Medium: Product
Timeline: Q4 2026
Role: Designer + Developer
Website: fielder.pages.dev