Aaryan Goundry
--:--:--

2026 · 231 pictures · not listed anywhere

Summer work.

Everything from the summer in one place — the photographing, the modelling, the three apps, and the site itself. Not linked from anywhere: it is here to be looked at while the unit runs, and it comes down afterwards.

Made

Photography

The whole summer’s shooting, the frames that went up and the ones that did not

136
Draft

I shoot a lot and I had never really stopped to ask why one frame works and the next one doesn’t. So this summer I started asking, every time something made me stop and look: what is the light doing, where has the subject been put in the frame, what colours keep turning up, and what has been left out on purpose.

I went round a few shows in Sheffield to see other people’s answers — The Football Art Prize and Pride of Yorkshire at the Millennium Gallery, Lives in Focus, and Gathering Landscapes at Weston Park. Photographs printed big and hung in a room are a completely different thing to photographs on a phone, which I knew but hadn’t really felt until I was standing in front of them.

What I keep landing on is that I don’t want to copy any of it. I want to work out how to recreate the feeling and then get there my own way.

The mask, side on, colour pushed until it bleeds
Same set-up, hands out
Seated, green halo, shot against a white wall
Close enough to read the watch
On the stool, grain left in
As close as the mask goes
Mirrored, one long exposure
Blue key, one flag, nothing else
A mirrorball, held like it weighs something
Waiting in the doorway between set-ups
Self-portrait, blown out
The camera itself, in autumn
Sepia, and a pair of rings
Under the dressing-room bulbs
Someone else lining up their own frame
Hands on the body, autumn light
Leaning on the counter, in the light
Two of us in the garden, hats and all
A rose, and someone leaning into it
In the shade, thinking about something else
Yellow beanie, caught in a shop mirror
A pick on the strings, held still
Standing in a field with a guitar
Sitting into the sun
Two people on a bridge, looking the same way
A caliper sitting behind the spokes
Blue nose, one lamp open
A dashboard through the windscreen, sun across it
A plate that has been there a while
Wheel and dials, nothing else in focus
Door open, nobody in it
Tail light and chrome, side on
Twin lamps, paint gone soft
A tyre, in black and white
The wheel through the glass, same roll
A fin, and the lights stacked under it
Inside, in black and white
An interior somebody has had fun with
Wood rim, quilted seats
1350c, and not much else
Mint green, all the way through
The same cabin from the other door
Skyline tail lights, twice over
Someone else’s dashboard
A Triumph behind showroom glass, after hours
Mazda RX-7 at a meet
Dodge Challenger, front quarter
Dino, dead on
The same car, front quarter
Red, with the sun doing the work
A Mini with stripes, parked on the grass
A Targa in a field
Bonnet up, somebody having a look
Rows of cars, and a lot of hats
Orange, at knee height
Turquoise, bonnet up, dog included
A Lotus in black and white, crowd behind
Green 911 in the long grass
A row of retired police cars
Yellow, and two people deciding something
A Mini unpacked into a picnic
Under the striped awning
Toys laid out on a bonnet
Over a red bonnet, into the row behind
GT86 in the park, graded cool
The same frame, graded warm
Show truck up on the ramp
A launch balloon, and the room reflected in it
Preening, gold light off the water
A mallard on the shingle
Wings open, standing its ground
Two of them, working something out
A gosling in the grass
Two goslings, one looking up
Up on the ridge with a parent
Huddled, low sun behind them
Low over the water, panned
Straight overhead, against flat grey
Traffic pulled into ribbons
Carnaby Street at blue hour
Soho, neon on brick
One lit window behind the scaffolding
An arcade, warm at the far end
A crossing, at the end of the day
Out of a bus window, the street doubled in the glass
Parked up, white building behind
Out of a window, somebody else’s road
Façade reduced to light and shadow
Pleats collapsing to a point
A doorway, in black and white
Blue forms, one behind the other
An edge held against a pale sky
Concrete colonnade, graffiti all the way down
Copper, curved, in full sun
A tower with the trees leaning in
Yellow wrap on a building coming down
A block on the water, flat light
Peeling paint, and an iron ring
A tower block, aerials and all
A façade bending round the corner
Brick corner against a hard blue
Through the tunnel, into the light
Concrete undercroft, strip lights and columns
An arch, and somebody standing in it
The whole house, in black and white
Closer, from the front
The castle, held at a distance behind a branch
The tower, framed by what fell down around it
Arches from underneath
A path, and somebody a long way down it
Steps, and then only sky
A green tunnel with one figure in it
The lake through a filter, held up by hand
Holding a stone up on the shore
Red against the hills
On the hill, dog first
Sun coming over the boats
Running at the cabin
A hut in the trees, light almost gone
The café, after everyone had left
Moss on everything
An old tree, from underneath
Something growing out of the rubble
A packet in the leaves, eye and all
Coals, still going underneath
Bracket fungus, stacked up
Roses, taken in a hand
Two of us on the seamless, masked
The castle, and somebody sitting in front of it
Trees, black and white
Photographing in the gallery
The studio with the lights up
The camera, in hand
An edit open on the laptop
A frame being worked on
Grading the goose

Blender

Learning it from nothing over four weeks

4
Draft

I had never opened Blender before this summer. Four weeks in I had a low-poly steampunk machine, which isn’t much, but it is four weeks further than I was.

What I am actually after is a cardboard steampunk world — something I can model, light, and move a camera through, and eventually shoot as stop-motion for a music video. Cardboard because it is a material anyone has, and because a world made of boxes is more interesting to me than a polished one.

The first block-out, in material preview
Pipes and towers, still grey
The machine, wider
The scene with everything in it

Research · Nottingham

Where the cardboard idea came from — not my work

3
Draft

Boxtropolis, at the Nottingham Puppet Festival over the summer: Sam Wilde builds a whole city out of cardboard boxes, with cardboard puppets living in it. Seeing it as a real object in a room, made of something completely ordinary, is what turned the steampunk idea from polished to cardboard.

The rest of the trip went into notes on how to actually put work in a room — A1 foam boards, V-shaped stands so a book can sit open, a projector, low frequency sound for atmosphere without being distracting, a citation list next to anything that isn’t mine. Louisa Chambers’ pastel work and Hondartza Fraga’s 365 Globes, a drawing a day under glass and every one of them different, are the two I keep going back to.

Nottingham — not my work
Nottingham — not my work
Nottingham — not my work

App development

Three apps, concept and design mine, code written with Claude as a tool

36
Draft

Three apps this summer, all built in Swift Playgrounds and Xcode. Cadence colours in the right notes as you write and sends the result out as MIDI. JamTrack takes a song apart and shows what the artist used, what in your own software gets close, and where the samples are. Channel Toolkit is a planning tool for my own YouTube channel — Studio tells you how a video did, this one is about what to make next.

None of them started as a coding project. They started as things I wanted and couldn’t find, so the concept, the features and every design call are mine and the code was the part I had to learn, written with Claude as a development tool.

The melody grid: green fits the chord, amber is in the key, grey will sound off
Chord notes, with shapes to build on underneath
Eight lanes and a set of pads you can record into
Every scale carries a feel and a Hear button
Overview — melody, chords and drums in one place
The same, in daylight
Library and demos
Themes, mixer and export
Live
Fruity
Logic
Decks
Cyber
Y2K
Pixel
Inspirations: one song at a time, swipe to keep or skip
Researched by hand, dated, every claim labelled and linked
With no hand-researched version, the app goes looking — and says so at the top
The Library: what you kept, back as a deck
Left or up to skip
Right to keep
Filters — your taste, or the genres you pick
Search, and what you have played recently
The search running, with how long it usually takes
A song taken apart the way you’d rebuild it
Samples, badged for where they come from and whether they cost
Favourites
Settings
Retro, light
Studio, dark
Studio, light
Hit finder — every video against the channel's typical numbers, cut by topic, title style and game
Trending now — what is gaining views today, set against my own back catalogue
Video ideas, generated from my own data
Thumbnail tester — a new thumbnail among the recent ones, at phone size
The phone layout

Working with AI

How it sits in the process — draft, for rewriting

Draft

I use Claude the way I’d use any other tool in the room. It does the part I’d otherwise get stuck on, and I do the part that makes it mine.

On the apps that meant the code. I know what I want an app to do and how it should feel to use, but I am not a developer, and before this summer that gap was the reason ideas stayed as ideas. Now I describe the thing, it writes a version, I use it, I tell it what is wrong, and we go again. Every feature, every screen and every design call is mine — the typing isn’t. Same on this site: I decide what goes on it and how it reads, and it builds the thing and tells me when what I’ve asked for won’t work on a phone.

The writing is the part I am careful about. If I let it write for me it stops sounding like me and people can tell, so I use it to get something on the page and then rewrite it. The draft is there to argue with, not to hand in.

What I’ve noticed is that it hasn’t made me do less. It has moved where the effort goes — less time stuck on how, more time on what and why. That is the part I actually care about.

The site

aaryan.goundry.com, built over the same weeks

21
The card the site puts up when you paste the link
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The site, on a desktop
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone
The same page, on a phone

Looked at

None of this is mine. They are my photographs of other people’s work and of the places I went to see it — gathered as reference, and kept apart from the work above so the two are never confused.

Steampunk

An afternoon in the engine hall

15
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work
Engine hall — not my work

UNIT

Signage, stickers and menus, all of a piece

9
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work
UNIT — not my work

Camping

Posters, bars and a gallery wall

7
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work
Encountered — not my work

Design boards

One per app. Every colour is read out of the code that draws it rather than picked off the screen by eye — and where it is defined as a system tint at some opacity, the hex it actually comes out as is shown beside it.

Cadence Read from Theme (New File.swift, l.2053) · Standard look
What it is

An iPhone app that colours in the right notes as you write. The palette is the interface — the colour of a cell is the app telling you how well that note fits.

TypeSF Pro. The Standard look sets no font design — the seven other looks do.
GeometryCell radius 3 · cell spacing 1 · panel radius 14
ModesLight and dark, both
Surface
  • Background #1C1C1E System, dark
  • Panel #2C2C2E System grouped
  • Background #F2F2F7 System, light
Meaning — the melody grid
  • Best fit #235B32 green at 35% on screen #275D36
  • Works #4E391A orange at 22% on screen #62451D
  • Off key #28282A secondary at 10%
  • Note #0A84FF accent on screen #1183F4
  • Playhead #3A2224 red at 18%
Accent — controls
  • Dark #0A84FF System blue on screen #1183F4
  • Light #007AFF System blue
Notes

Best fit, Works, Off key and Note are the app’s own words for these four — they are printed under the theme picker in Song settings, so the key to the colour system is inside the app rather than in a manual nobody reads.

The theme system changes structure, not just colour. A look can set a border, a flat offset shadow, a window title bar, a grid overlay across the page, uppercase titles and HUD corner marks — which is why Y2K and Cyber read as different software rather than the same app repainted.

Seven looks besides Standard: Live, Fruity, Logic, Decks, Cyber, Y2K, Pixel. Each is a reference to a piece of music software.

The melody grid: green fits the chord, amber is in the key, grey will sound off
Overview — melody, chords and drums in one place
The same, in daylight
Themes, mixer and export
JamTrack Read from AppLook, SourceInfo (JamTrack.swift) and Confidence (RealBreakdowns.swift) · Default look
What it is

An app for producers. Its colour system is about provenance — where a sound came from and whether you can have it.

TypeSF Pro, default design. Retro switches to rounded, Studio to condensed.
GeometryCorner radius 8 — Retro 14, Studio 2
ModesLight and dark × three looks
Surface
  • Background #000000 System, untouched on screen #000000
  • Row #1C1C1E System, untouched on screen #1D1D1F
  • Accent #FF9F0A System orange on screen #FC9D5B
Where a sound came from
  • YouTube #FF3B30 red
  • SoundCloud #FF9500 orange
  • Freesound #30B0C7 teal
  • Looperman #34C759 green
  • Splice #007AFF blue
  • Loopmasters #AF52DE purple
  • ADSR #5856D6 indigo
Whether you can have it
  • Free #34C759 green
  • Paid #FF2D55 pink
How much to trust it
  • Confirmed #34C759 green · checkmark.seal
  • Reported #007AFF blue · newspaper
  • Community guess #8E8E93 grey · person.2
  • AI guess #AF52DE purple · sparkles
Notes

Every claim about a real artist carries a trust level, and the trust level has a colour and a symbol of its own: green and a seal for Confirmed, blue and a newspaper for Reported, grey and two people for a Community guess, purple and sparkles for anything the app researched itself. Nothing the app found on its own can be mistaken for something the artist said.

Defined in RealBreakdowns.swift alongside the sourced breakdowns — the colour and the evidence are written in the same place, so a claim cannot get a colour without a source.

Three looks: Default (Apple), Retro desktop (early-2000s windows and rounded letters) and Studio (flat grey panels, sharp corners, after Ableton Live).

Researched by hand, dated, every claim labelled and linked
Samples, badged for where they come from and whether they cost
Inspirations: one song at a time, swipe to keep or skip
The Library: what you kept, back as a deck
Channel Toolkit Read from the CSS custom properties in channel-toolkit_8.html
What it is

A planning tool for my own YouTube channel. Two borrowed brand colours on a neutral set of tokens, so the tool looks like the platforms it reads.

TypeRoboto, falling back to system-ui
SurfaceAn Apple-glass layer in its own stylesheet, switchable off in Appearance
ModesFull light and dark token sets
Brand
  • Primary #FF0033 YouTube red · --pri
  • Accent, light #9146FF Twitch purple · --acc
  • Accent, dark #A970FF --acc
Light tokens
  • --bg #F8F8FA
  • --surf #FFFFFF
  • --raise #F1F1F4
  • --line #E2E2E7
  • --ink #18181B
  • --mute #6B6B73
Dark tokens
  • --bg #0F0F12
  • --surf #18181D
  • --raise #222229
  • --line #303038
  • --ink #F4F4F5
  • --mute #A1A1AA
State
  • Good #16A34A
  • Warn #D97706
  • Error #DC2626
  • Info #2563EB
Notes

No logo in the app — taken out on purpose. The only marks are the icon files beside it: a purple blob, a glass blob and a transparent one.

The chrome is almost entirely neutral. Red and purple appear only where something is a platform or an action, which is why a screen of numbers reads as numbers.

Unsettled: the screens still say Creator Kit while everything around them says Channel Toolkit. One of the two names has to go.

Hit finder — every video against the channel's typical numbers, cut by topic, title style and game
Trending now — what is gaining views today, set against my own back catalogue
Thumbnail tester — a new thumbnail among the recent ones, at phone size
The phone layout
aaryan.goundry.com Read from the custom properties in assets/css/main.css
What it is

The site itself. One field colour, two type families and a set of tokens a whole band can be recoloured by — which is how a page changes temperature without a single component being rewritten.

DisplayBricolage Grotesque — variable, self-hosted
BodyArchivo — variable, self-hosted
MonoJetBrains Mono — labels, metadata, anything that is data
ScaleSeven steps, 0.72rem to 15rem, each one a clamp so it grows with the viewport rather than stepping at a breakpoint
GeometryCorner radius 0 · rules 1px · gutter clamps 1rem to 2.5rem
Motioncubic-bezier(.22, 1, .36, 1) at 0.6s, everywhere
ModesLight and dark, switched by hand and remembered
The field colour
  • Raspberry #AB185D --rasp · 6.95:1 on white
  • Deep #7E1145 --rasp-deep · the curtain, on dark
  • Tone #931651 --rasp-tone · motif only, never text
  • Lift #FF7FB0 --rasp-lift · accent on dark, 6.3:1
Light
  • --bg #FFFFFF
  • --ink #181818 body copy
  • --bg-2 #F5F5F5 ink at 4%
  • --rule #D1D1D1 ink at 20%
Dark
  • --bg #000000
  • --fg #F8F1F4
  • --bg-2 #141414
  • --accent-fg #1A0710 text on the lift
Notes

A band is the whole trick. Any section can be given .band and it swaps its own background, foreground, rules, tint and accent as a set — so a raspberry section and a white one are the same components with different tokens, and nothing inside either has to know which it is sitting in.

Every contrast ratio is written into the stylesheet beside the colour it belongs to. Raspberry is 6.95:1 on white and the lighter one is 6.3:1 on black, so the accent stays legible in both modes rather than only the one it was designed in.

Square corners and hairline rules throughout, carried over from the 2024–25 portfolio. Three variable fonts, self-hosted and preloaded as woff2, so nothing is fetched from anybody else’s server and the type does not reflow on arrival.

Home
The work index
Photography
About
Home, on a phone
The work index, on a phone

The deck

The five slides, rebuilt here at 16:9 with the pictures in them. Same words, spelling fixed. Click any picture to see it full size.

01 The Encounter 16:9 · 2 pictures

The Encounter

The work I was most interested in and wanted to develop was the work I did for my first PPU project. We created a mockup website and app for a future oxygen supply. I was really passionate about turning the mockups into a functioning application.

I didn’t have enough time to do that because of deadlines and my small experience with Xcode, so I wanted to spend some time over the holidays developing it.

My current interests are in photography, code (Xcode and Wordpress) and Blender.

Your most interesting and strongest previous work (Y2, DPS, etc.) · How this work connects to your current position, skills and interests · What you’re interested in now

EIRA — the oxygen supply mockups, watch and phone
Shooting on the seamless, the frame up on the screen
02 Coding (Xcode and Wordpress) 16:9 · 6 pictures

Coding (Xcode and Wordpress)

I have past experience with Wordpress, picking up skills from my previous college course before university. I later got into Xcode during year 2 of university with a workshop. The problem I had with them was that I’m not really experienced with coding, and my ideas for applications and websites take too long for me to develop. Tutorials online and the large amount of magazines I have take forever to learn from, and it’s hard to get videos for specific issues. A lot of the tutorials use big terms and phrases that I just don’t understand as a beginner.

So I adopted AI into my workflow, in this case Claude. It helps me as an assistant that checks my screen in real time and is there to help me learn a lot more efficiently, and it keeps my code clean and tidy with the drop of a command. It really helps problem solve immediate errors in seconds and it quickly boosted my efficiency in bringing my applications to life.

I spent the summer creating a portfolio website and 3 applications, including a music theory application that teaches users music theory and creates melodies and harmonies in real time, and a music research tool to find what your favourite artists use to create music — the names of all their equipment, their latest news and even the specific samples and sounds they use — alongside a Tinder-inspired feed to find new songs for inspiration.

Working the watch face out with Claude, sources at the bottom
JamTrack — a song taken apart, with where each answer came from
Cadence — chords, melody and the overview
Channel Toolkit — the dashboard and the hit finder
The old Behance portfolio
The new site, built over the summer
03 Photography 16:9 · 4 pictures

Photography

I wanted to spend the holidays developing my photography skills with layout and composition, to convey a story and use depth between elements.

Composition and layout are two important principles that don’t just come with photography but with all my design work, and they were what I needed to strengthen. So this was my way of developing it.

The questions I ask when something makes me stop

What makes me stop and look?

How is the photographer using light?

Where have they put the subject in the frame?

What colours keep appearing?

Is the image telling me a story?

What has been deliberately left out?

How could I recreate the feeling, rather than copy the photograph?

Lucie Benison

I was inspired by a student’s work, Lucie Benison’s, where they used a mix of photography and monoprinting to create art pieces that have photographed images of houses being engulfed in paint. I really love these visuals and it inspired me to use practical printing methods alongside my photography.

Seen at the Rheged arts centre near Penrith · not my work

Two geese, one turning
The wheel through the glass
The tower
Lucie Benison — monoprints on the wall at Rheged
04 Blender 16:9 · 6 pictures

Blender

What I went to look at over the summer, and the question it started

I wanted to explore Blender during the holidays because I was really interested in building my own mini worlds digitally as a 3D model.

I first took a YouTube tutorial to create a basic house, and from there I went on to building a more stylised city for my little character. Before I made it I went to Sam Wilde’s exhibition of Boxtropolis.

I additionally took a lot of inspiration from traditional sewing machines and hydraulic machinery, because I wanted to develop the steampunk style in my 3D models — I thought it was suitable for my little character.

Sam Wilde — Boxtropolis

A futuristic city built out of cardboard boxes, with cardboard puppets living in it.

Idea: start with a loose sketch, turn it into a cardboard 3D model, and shoot it as stop-motion for a music video — a steampunk future world made out of cardboard, taking some cues from LittleBigPlanet. For an exhibition the models could be rebuilt at full size like Boxtropolis, hung on string to add depth, with clouds behind them. Softer materials would need metal-cored string so the work doesn’t sag.

Nottingham, 28 August 2026 · not my work

The first block-out, following the tutorial
The city with the little character in it
The machine, closer
Sam Wilde — Boxtropolis
Knitting machine — the shapes I was after
Hydraulic machinery, in the red
05 What’s next? 16:9 · 3 pictures

What’s next?

I want to explore more into practical printing methods and use my photography to help produce high quality prints.

I also want to learn how to work alongside Claude to figure out how I could improve my efficiency as a designer — using AI for the inconvenient work but not replacing my creative vision, and freeing up more time for practical work.

And also develop my skills inside of Blender.

Where you might go next: your future ambitions and what you would like to explore in Y3/4

One I would print
Where the modelling is up to
The kind of machinery I want to build next

The deck, plainer

The same five slides with the words cut back. The pictures are the ones off my InDesign pages, in the same places.

01 Summer Work

Summer Work

My first PPU project was a mockup website and app for a future oxygen supply. I wanted to turn the mockups into a working app, but deadlines and not knowing Xcode got in the way. So I spent the summer doing it.

What I am working in now: photography, code and Blender.

02 Coding

Coding

I picked up Wordpress at college and Xcode in year 2. The tutorials use terms I do not understand yet, and my ideas take too long to build.

So I started working with Claude. It watches my screen, keeps the code tidy and fixes errors in seconds. Every design call is still mine.

Over the summer I made a portfolio site and two apps: one that teaches music theory, and one that finds what your favourite artists use, with a feed for finding new songs.

03 Photography

Photography

I spent the summer on layout and composition, telling a story and using depth between things. Both run through all my design work, not only photography.

  • What makes me stop and look?
  • How is the photographer using light?
  • Where have they put the subject?
  • What colours keep appearing?
  • Is it telling me a story?
  • What has been left out?
  • How would I recreate the feeling, not copy the photograph?

Lucie Benison mixes photography with monoprinting, photographed houses engulfed in paint. I saw it at Rheged, near Penrith, and it made me want to print my own work.

Lucie Benison, at Rheged. Not my work.
04 Blender

Blender

I wanted to build my own small worlds. I started with a YouTube tutorial for a house, then built a stylised city for my little character.

Before that I saw Sam Wilde’s Boxtropolis, a city made of cardboard boxes with cardboard puppets living in it. It is where the idea came from: sketch it, build it in cardboard, then shoot it as stop-motion.

I took the rest from old sewing machines and hydraulic machinery. I wanted my character’s world to feel steampunk.

Sam Wilde, Boxtropolis. Not my work.
05 What’s next?

What’s next?

Practical printing, using my photography to make good prints.

Working out how far Claude takes me. Letting it have the inconvenient work so I get more time to make things, without it replacing what I decide.

And more Blender.