Titanium nitride deposited by physical vapor deposition — a 1–5 µm gold-yellow ceramic film that's harder than the underlying tool steel. Twice as gold as gold plate, never wears off, doesn't tarnish. The gold finish on cutting tools, watch cases, plumbing fixtures, eyeglass frames. Looks plated, behaves like a ceramic.
Cathodic-arc or magnetron-sputter deposition of titanium nitride (TiN) onto a substrate held at 200–500 °C in a vacuum chamber backfilled with N₂. Film thickness 1–5 µm, hardness 2000–2500 HV (vs. ~600 HV for hardened tool steel), color characteristic gold-yellow. Adhesion driven by ion bombardment etch of the substrate before deposition; the film is the substrate, atomically. Color is from the band-gap of TiN (~2.3 eV); slight variation with N stoichiometry (TiN₀.₉ leans copper, TiN₁.₁ leans pale gold). Common decorative target for tools, jewelry, plumbing; functional target for cutting tools where the hardness extends life 3–5×.
character — warm gold-yellow, hard ceramic surface, doesn't tarnish, doesn't wear, smooth as the substrate.
ASTM B488 / B456 / B689 plating standards; Powder Coating Institute and industry-association literature.
House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.
Materials and processes for people who design and make things.
A local-first library of materials, processes, applications, and finishes — equal weight, citable everywhere, with cost-over-volume curves, trade-off profiles, equipment-tier filters, and second-life paths layered onto the data so a student can move from "what is this" toward "what's actually buildable here, now, by me." Part of the renato.design ecosystem — sibling of Plenum, Specimen, Ingenue, gesture, graf, and the Renato Rhino plug-ins. Form and matter, inseparable.
Half of teaching materials is teaching how the material is made into the thing. The standard subscription library was always light on that half. The wedge here isn't better samples or a prettier interface — it's treating Process as a peer entity, not a footnote.
Conway's Material World on raw materials, Lefteri's Making It on processes, Forty's Concrete and Culture, Sparke's Design in Context, Bürdek's Design: History, Theory and Practice of Product Design, Schröpfer's Material Design on materials in architecture, Winchester's The Perfectionists on tolerance, Minshall's Your Life Is Manufactured on the global supply chain, von Busch's Making Trouble on material activism, Were's How Materials Matter, Hegger / Drexler / Zeumer's Basics Materials, Untracht and McCreight on metalsmithing, USDA Forest Products Lab on woods, GIA on gemstones, Schott / CoorsTek / Toray / Owens Corning datasheets, MakeItFrom for verifiable property numbers, ASM Handbook, ISO standards. Museum holdings draw from the Met, MAD, V&A, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Newark Museum of Art, British Museum, Heard Museum, Smithsonian NMAI, Eiteljorg Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, and Grand Rapids Art Museum — collection-record permalinks only, designer overview pages and exhibition listings excluded. Voice blocks now ride on every entry kind — material, process, application, and finish — and include Ruskin on iron, Anni Albers on twining, Greg Lynn on the shred-and-teeth NURBS lineage, Pugin on the metal that won't be hammered, Barthes / Yanagi / Benjamin channeled within their philosophy; Sparke, Bürdek, Forty, Conway, Schröpfer, Minshall, von Busch, Lefteri, Pat Pruitt, Mary Lee Hu, Tom Joyce, Albert Paley, and the rest of the contemporary makers quoted verbatim with citation. All cited.
Local to this browser. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.