Sourcing

Materials and processes age slowly. Supply chains age weekly.

ForMatter's job is to be authoritative on the first and a signpost on the second. This page is the signpost — curated link clusters that point you at the live infrastructure questions you have to answer before you actually spec a part: who sells the raw stock, who runs the service bureau, what certification body governs the standard, where the regional fab directories live.

Links go stale. Each cluster carries a last-checked date so you know how old the editorial pass is. If you find a broken link, mail it to phil at renato dot design.

This page deliberately does not participate in search, filtering, or the project workspace. It's a sibling to /voices.html and /disclaimer.html — a flat reference, not a queryable surface.

Raw material suppliers

last checked 2026-04-28 · Where to actually buy small-quantity stock for prototyping, plus the larger industrial mills behind the supply chain.

McMaster-Carr — The default for hobby and prototype stock — metals, plastics, fasteners, abrasives. US-only direct, but the catalog itself is the canonical materials reference.
Online Metals — Cut-to-size aluminum, steel, brass, copper, titanium. Better unit pricing than McMaster for larger pieces.
Sculpt Nouveau — Specialty patinas, dyes, finishing chemicals for sculpture-grade work.
Boulter Plywood — Marine and aircraft plywood, premium veneers — the canonical premium plywood source.
Curbell Plastics — Sheet and rod plastic stock — PMMA, PC, PP, PEEK, UHMW, etc.
Rio Grande — Jewelry-grade metal, casting investment, gemstones, hand tools.
Rotometals — Pewter, bismuth, tin, lead, low-melt alloys for casting.
TAP Plastics — Acrylic, fiberglass, casting resins — strong for west-coast US designers.
Hobart Welders supplier directory — Find a local welding-supply distributor for filler rod, gas, consumables.

Process service bureaus

last checked 2026-04-28 · Outsource a one-off or low-volume run when you don't own the tool yourself.

Protolabs — Injection molding, CNC, sheet metal, 3D printing — the canonical price-anchor for low-volume production.
Xometry — Manufacturing-on-demand marketplace; instant quoting across CNC, 3D printing, sheet metal, casting.
Shapeways — 3D-printing service bureau — strong for designer-quantity SLS, MJF, metal.
Fictiv — CNC and injection-molding partner network; engineering-managed quality.
Sculpteo — European 3D-printing service; useful EU-side counterpart to Shapeways.
PCBWay — PCB fabrication + assembly; also CNC and 3D printing.
Ponoko — Laser cutting + 3D printing; useful for designer-quantity sheet work.

Certification bodies and standards

last checked 2026-04-28 · When you need to cite a standard verbatim, this is where to look it up.

ASTM International — American standards across materials, finishes, test methods. Most ASTM standards are paywalled; preview pages give scope and applicability.
ISO Online Browsing Platform — International Organization for Standardization catalog. Some standards free to read online.
EN Standards (European Norms) via CEN — European technical standards; harmonized across EU member states.
SAE International — Automotive and aerospace standards (J-numbers — e.g. SAE J2929 for EV batteries, SAE AS for aerospace).
AWS — American Welding Society — Welding-process standards (AWS D1.1 for steel, D1.2 for aluminum, etc.).
BSI Online (British Standards) — BS-numbered standards including BS 1088 for marine plywood.
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) — Chain-of-custody certification for timber and wood products.
Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute — C2C-certified products database for cradle-to-cradle assignments.

Safety, compliance, and regulatory

last checked 2026-04-29 · When the part touches food, skin, a child, or a worker, the regulatory question comes before the design question. These are the canonical entry points — not the law itself, but the body that publishes it.

FDA Food Contact Substances database — US: every polymer, additive, and coating that may legally touch food. Search by substance or by Food Contact Notification number; the answer is binary (cleared or not) but the use-conditions matter — read the linked notification.
EU REACH / ECHA portal — EU: registration, evaluation, authorisation, and restriction of chemicals. SVHC (Substances of Very High Concern) candidate list updates twice a year; check before specifying a colorant, plasticizer, or flame retardant in any EU-bound product.
EU RoHS Directive 2011/65/EU — EU: lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, PBB, PBDE, phthalates banned in electrical and electronic equipment. Drives the lead-free solder, lead-free brass, and chrome-VI-free chrome plating norms across consumer electronics.
OSHA worker safety standards — US: workplace exposure limits (PELs), respiratory protection, machine guarding. Wood-dust, formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium, lead, and isocyanate (PU resins) all carry specific standards. The studio is a workplace too.
CPSC consumer product safety database — US: lead in children's products (<100 ppm under CPSIA), small parts and choking hazards, sleep-environment regulations, art-materials labeling (LHAMA / ASTM D-4236).
ISO 10993 — Biocompatibility evaluation — Skin-contact, mucosal-contact, and implant medical-device biocompatibility. The standard family any wearable, jewelry-with-skin-contact, or medical-grade product gets evaluated against.
California Proposition 65 list — CA: chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive harm. Triggers the canonical 'WARNING' label on consumer products sold in California — read before choosing a colorant, brass alloy (lead), or solder formulation.

Materials property databases

last checked 2026-05-11 · Where to fact-check a property number — modulus, density, melting point, dielectric constant, hardness, lifecycle indicators. Free where noted; institutional / paywalled where the abstract layer alone is still useful as a starting point.

MakeItFrom — Free property data for thousands of metals, plastics, ceramics, and composites — the main fact-check resource for ForMatter's property tables. Comparable-pair pages (e.g. 6061 vs 7075) are the strongest single-page format on the open web.
MatWeb — Searchable property datasheets across alloys, plastics, ceramics, composites, fluids, and fibers. Free search; full datasheet view requires a free account. The largest free property database on the open web.
AZoM (A-Z of Materials) — Free editorial materials encyclopedia plus aggregated supplier datasheets. Articles are reasonably citable for context; cross-check property numbers against MakeItFrom or MatWeb.
Granta CES EduPack (educational) — Industry-canonical materials-and-processes database; widely used in design schools. Subscription, but the EduPack tier is the reference design schools build their materials curriculum around.
NIST Chemistry WebBook — Free thermophysical and chemical property data for pure substances — heats of formation, vapor pressures, IR / mass spectra. The canonical reference for any chemistry-adjacent property claim.
The Materials Project — Free DFT-computed properties for inorganic crystals — band gap, formation energy, elastic constants, phonon dispersion. Run from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; free with account. Cite as computed, not measured.
NIMS MatNavi — Japan's National Institute for Materials Science — free polymer, metal, ceramic, and superconducting-materials databases. The polymer database is particularly strong; English UI throughout.
CAMPUS Plastics — Free plastics datasheet portal maintained by the resin producers themselves (BASF, Covestro, DSM, etc.). Property numbers are tested to consistent ISO methods, so they're directly comparable across vendors.
UL Prospector — Plastics, coatings, adhesives, lubricants, personal-care ingredients. Free with industry account. Strongest tool for finding a specific commercial grade by property requirement.
The Wood Database (Eric Meier) — Free identification and working-properties reference for hundreds of wood species — Janka hardness, modulus, workability, allergens, sustainability status. The default for any wood-species lookup on the open web.
Mindat — Free mineralogy and geology database covering thousands of mineral species — crystallography, optical properties, type localities, museum specimens. The reference behind any stone or gemstone entry.

Lifecycle inventories

last checked 2026-05-11 · Cradle-to-gate inventory data for sustainability work — embodied carbon, energy, water, and the EPD record behind a specific product.

Inventory of Carbon and Energy (ICE) — Hammond & Jones — Free PDF; embodied-carbon data for construction materials. The default cradle-to-gate reference for architecture-school sustainability assignments.
ecoinvent — The largest commercial life-cycle inventory database. Subscription required, but the abstracts are public.
ÖKOBAUDAT — Free German federal LCA database for construction products — the reference behind EU EPD declarations and DGNB / BNB sustainability certifications.
EPDs International — Environmental Product Declarations searchable by product category.

Environmental impact calculators

last checked 2026-04-28 · Run quick impact estimates for a specific material or process choice.

OneClick LCA — Building-life-cycle and product-life-cycle assessment tooling.
Sphera GaBi (now LCA for Experts) — Industry-standard LCA software; subscription.
EcoTransIT World — Free transport-emissions calculator; useful for the supply-chain leg of an LCA.
Climatiq — API-first carbon-emissions data; free tier for designer-scale projects.

Regional fab directories

last checked 2026-04-28 · Where to find a maker space, hackerspace, fab lab, or sympathetic shop near you.

Fab Foundation Lab Network — MIT-pedigreed fab labs worldwide.
Hackerspaces.org — Volunteer-maintained worldwide list of hackerspaces.
MAKE: Makerspace Directory — Make magazine's curated directory.
ASCC Foundry directory (industrial casting) — American Foundry Society — locate metal-casting shops by capability and region.

Peer publications and editorial lineage

last checked 2026-05-11 · Editorial publications that center materials the way ForMatter does — kin, not sources. A ForMatter entry is a database row with a voice block; these publications run the long-form essay the voice block points back to. Read them; cite them in your own work; do not lift their text into a database entry. Where a publication has a deep dive on a material ForMatter also covers, the right move is a 'further reading' link out, not a paraphrase.

Material Intelligence (Chipstone Foundation) — An online magazine published by the Chipstone Foundation; each issue gathers essays from many disciplines around a single everyday material, with art-historical and anthropological framing alongside the technical. The single-material-as-anthology format is the closest peer to ForMatter's per-entry voice-block stack on the open web. Where ForMatter and MI cover the same material, link out and read the issue — never reproduce or paraphrase the articles into a database entry.
Cabinet Magazine — Long-running culture magazine that periodically devotes whole issues to a single material or material condition — Property (issue 10), Mountains (27), Shame (31), Dust (35), among many others. Back issues sold out; the full archive reads free online. The editorial register — material as a hinge between disciplines — is part of ForMatter's lineage.
Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley) — Long-form essays on the material infrastructure of food — refrigeration, salt, ice, packaging, supply chain. The reference style for writing about a material as a system rather than a thing.
99% Invisible — Roman Mars's design podcast and archive. The episodes that center a material or a manufacturing process are the audio analogue of a ForMatter voice block — short, citationally honest, narratively shaped around a single object or substance.
Disegno Journal — Biannual design journal with strong materials and process reporting — closer to a critic's register than a database, useful for the cultural reading underneath a CMF specification.

Concordance

House vocabulary — terms ForMatter uses with intent.

anisotropic: Direction-dependent. Wood reads differently along the grain than across it; rolled steel is stiffer along the rolling direction. The Principled-BSDF anisotropic input rotates the highlight to match.
anodize: Electrochemical oxide layer grown on aluminum (Type II / III), titanium, or niobium. Type II accepts dye for color; titanium / niobium use voltage-driven thin-film interference instead of dye. The CMF entry covers the seal step that locks the color in.
application: What the thing IS, in the world. The third entity, peer of material and process. A water bottle, a chair, an extruded-aluminum profile.
BRDF: Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function. The math behind how a surface returns light for any incoming and outgoing direction. The PBR model is a parameterized BRDF.
channeled: A voice block written within a dead author's philosophy, marked and cited. Distinct from a verbatim quote. Roland Barthes channeled on PMMA reads like Barthes; the citation attributes the lineage.
CMF: Color, Material, Finish — the trio designers specify together when handing a part off for production. ForMatter's Finish entity is the F in CMF: 10 categories — polish / anodize / patina / plate / coating / texture / cut / mold_finish / glaze / stone_finish — and 100+ entries. Every finish entry pairs to the materials and processes it suits.
choral fugue: ForMatter's register. Subject stated plainly (freshman tier), answered in technical and sensorial registers, countersubjects from linked processes and applications, citations as final stretto. Voice blocks where canon attaches.
clearcoat: A second specular layer over the base surface. Glossy plastics and lacquered woods get a clearcoat term in the PBR table. IOR 1.5 by default.
compatibility (process): Each process entry lists which materials it can work. The cross-ref renders as sphere pills so the gallery feeling extends inward.
confidence: Each entry tagged high / medium / low. A senior's low-confidence-with-three-citations beats a freshman's high-confidence-with-none. The label is a contract with the reader, not a brag.
crystalline (finish): A faceted-surface read — gemstones, glassy minerals, ice. Drives PBR defaults: IOR 2.42 (diamond), transmission 1.0, low roughness.
derive_pbr(): The build's single source of truth — sphere palette + finish enum → Principled-BSDF starter values. One function feeds the entry-page table, the per-host snippets, the glTF export, and the Three.js Live Preview.
finish (entity): ForMatter's CMF layer — surface treatments and conditions a designer chooses for a given material and process. Categories: polish, anodize, patina, plate, coating, texture, cut, mold_finish, glaze, stone_finish. Distinct from the sphere `finish` enum (metallic / matte / glossy / etc.) which is the visual register of the proxy.
freshman / senior register: Two registers in every entry — the plain freshman description and the technical / sensorial one. Same database, two readers, no extra subscription.
glTF: GL Transmission Format — the open 3D-asset standard every modern app reads. ForMatter emits a .gltf material doc per material. Open standard, designer-friendly handoff.
IOR: Index of Refraction. How much light bends entering the surface. Air 1.0, water 1.33, glass 1.5, diamond 2.42. Drives transmission and the specular term.
iridescent (finish): Hue-shifted accent over base. Anodized titanium and niobium, opal, paraíba. Drives PBR defaults: low metalness, full iridescence, clearcoat.
iridescence: Thin-film interference layer over the base material. KHR_materials_iridescence in glTF, MeshPhysicalMaterial.iridescence in Three.js. Tunable from the FOCUS slider on iridescent / pearlescent entries. The ior and thickness range together set the visible color sweep — opal uses a 100–800 nm thickness range (film, not wavelength) to span the full visible band.
lite-PBR: ForMatter's PBR approach — Principled-BSDF starter values per entry, no measured BRDFs, no commercial assets. Honest reasonable defaults from the finish enum, per-entry numeric overrides where you have a real reason.
Live Preview: The Three.js shader ball that replaces the static CSS sphere on every entry page. One render path for every category — metals, woods, polymers, ceramics, paints, textiles, gemstones, glass. Same derive_pbr() values, real-time lit by a synthetic studio environment, draggable. Optional — toggle in Preferences.
material: What the thing is MADE OF. The first entity. Aluminum 6061, white oak, soda-lime glass.
metallic (finish): Specular highlight, deep shadow rim. Drives PBR defaults: metalness 1, low roughness, IOR 1.45. Polished steel, gold, copper.
mood board: Folded into the Project workspace at /project.html. The mood-board upload, palette extraction, character chips, and matcher results all live alongside the collected items grid and the save .formatter / save PDF / open .formatter actions — one feature, one page.
Ollama: Local-LLM scaffold on the Project page. Off by default. When toggled on in Preferences AND Ollama is reachable at localhost:11434, the natural-language input box ('something soft and warm with a wet read') asks the model to translate the description into character-chip toggles. Never invents material properties; the LLM only translates intent into existing chip vocabulary. The keyword fast-path (chips alone, no LLM) is the default — see suite-wide ai-integration pattern.
project: The full workspace at /project.html — collected materials, processes, applications, finishes plus an optional mood-board image whose dominant colors search the library for matches. Save / open .formatter files round-trip the project state. Cross-conversation: the Project page replaces the slide-down panel that used to live behind the appbar 'project' button.
patina: A chemical color shift on metal — heat-blue on steel, fume-black on silver, verdigris on copper, gun-blue on tool steel, ferric on copper. CMF-layer entry; cited by both the material and the process pages that produce it.
PBR: Physically-Based Rendering. The shading model every modern 3D app uses, parameterized by metallic / roughness / IOR / transmission / clearcoat / sheen. ForMatter publishes starter values for every material entry.
SPI mold finish: Society of the Plastics Industry mold-cavity finish standard. A1 / A2 / A3 (diamond polish, mirror), B1 / B2 / B3 (paper, semi-gloss), C1 / C2 / C3 (stone, matte), D1 / D2 / D3 (dry blast, textured). The finish prints from the mold cavity onto the molded part — a designer picks the SPI grade with the molder when specifying the tool.
Principled BSDF: Blender's name for the consolidated PBR shader. Most other apps ship the same shader under different names (Standard Surface, ShaderGraph, Substance). One node, every output.
process: How the material is MADE INTO the thing. The second entity. Cast, machined, kerf-bent, anodized, planished, granulated. Process is a peer of material, not a footnote.
quote: A voice block carrying a verbatim quotation from a living author, with citation. Distinct from a channeled block. Living = quote only; the rule is enforced at the schema layer.
roughness: Microsurface scatter. 0 is mirror-smooth; 1 is fully diffuse. Most real surfaces sit between 0.2 and 0.8.
sphere proxy: ForMatter's visible-character stand-in for every material. CSS-gradient driven by the entry's palette and finish, not a baked render. Honest about being a proxy, scales to six hundred entries cheaply, tweakable in one place.
substitute: A peer material that could fill a similar role. Cross-references render as sphere pills inside an entry — the gallery feeling extends inward.
transmission: How much light passes through. 1 is fully transparent; 0 is opaque. Glass, gemstones, clear plastics carry transmission.
PVD: Physical Vapor Deposition — vacuum-chamber sputter or cathodic-arc deposition of a thin ceramic film onto a metal substrate. The CMF-layer's modern coating chemistry: TiN (gold), ZrN (champagne), CrN (pewter), TiCN (warm bronze / rose-gold), AlTiN (charcoal-anthracite, near-black), DLC (deep black). Hard, doesn't tarnish, paint-thin.
VDI 3400: German engineering reference standard for mold-cavity texture (Erodieren bearbeitete Werkstückoberflächen). The full scale runs reference plates 0–45 by Ra value; production specs typically draw from 12–45 because plates 0–11 require diamond-mirror polish on the mold cavity and are rarely commissioned in commercial tooling. Pairs with the SPI standard; both define what gets cut into the mold.
voice block: A versal block where a real authored voice attaches to the material or process. Schema-tagged with status (living / dead) and mode (quote / channeled). Citations always.
woodgrain (finish): Directional sheen with grain ring. Drives PBR defaults: anisotropic 0.6, medium roughness, no metalness. Every wood entry.

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ForMatter

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.

Why this exists

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.

Rules of the house

Citations or it didn't happen. Every property number, every claim, every borrowed register has a traceable source.
Living authors are quoted only. Verbatim or not at all.
Dead authors may be channeled within their philosophy — marked, cited, never impersonated.
Permalink or nothing. Museum holdings link to the specific collection-record URL. Designer overview pages, press releases, and exhibition listings don't qualify.
Relative, not absolute. Cost, lead time, and other figures that age get published as ratios and ranges. Crossover points beat magnitudes.
Confidence labeled honestly. A senior's low-confidence-with-three-citations beats a freshman's high-confidence-with-none.
Local-first. Works offline, no login, no subscription.

Sister apps

Ingenue — five voices argue about what to build from electronic parts. Where ForMatter teaches what the thing is made of, Ingenue proposes what the thing could be.
Plenum — VIN, fender-tag, and broadcast-sheet decoder for muscle and pony cars; doo-wop register.
Specimen — iPhone 3D scanner that treats the captured object as a specimen, with voiced commentary.
renato.design — the rest.

Sources

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.

v0.6.82 — 2026-05-11 · Phil Renato · renato.design · MIT-licensed code, CC BY-NC research content