Reframe: Rethinking Versioning as a Creative Practice in Coding

Creative Coding is characterized by iterative and exploratory workflows oriented toward open-ended outcomes. Practitioners make small adjustments to parameter values and code structure, where even minor edits can produce drastically different visual results. Yet existing tools offer limited means for tracking this process, and creative coders rely on time-consuming strategies to save, inspect, compare, and revisit prior versions. More importantly, this is not only a practical limitation but also a conceptual mismatch: the tools used to manage versions can shape and potentially constrain the creative process itself. This article derives design considerations and presents Reframe, a web-based Creative Coding environment for p5.js that seeks to support creative work by rethinking versioning. By distinguishing between structural and value-level change and combining non-linear navigation, direct code editing, parameter-level exploration, and continuous visual feedback, Reframe is designed to support divergence, reflection, and continued iteration while keeping source code as the creative medium.