About - Hopific

Hi!

I’m Thomas Jeremy Tait. I help architectural designers learn Grasshopper for Rhino to empower them to design more in less time and to model flexible, complex geometries.

I’m a practicing architect with working experience in award-winning architecture practices in Asia, the US and Europe. In over a decade of professional experience in working with Grasshopper, I’ve encountered every imaginable design problem and have learned the hard way what actually works!

I’ve spent countless hours finding the best ways to approach design problems with Grasshopper, and I share everything on this site so you can save time, money, and headaches on your path.

Find me on LinkedIn!

Our values

Real world use
The course has been developed to provide you with processes and approaches that we believe to be of actual, real-world value. We value your time and focus on teaching you what will help with YOUR transformation. We don’t hold back and share every piece of knowledge to provide you with the most value possible.

Healthy Architecture.
As designers we believe in creating spaces that promote health and well-being. In order to do that we believe that architects themselves should be leading a healthy, balanced life – we teach Computational Design because we believe that it’s key in reducing repetitive tasks, broadening the creative scope of our work and enabling a healthy work-life balance.

Design first.
We at hopific love designing. We teach you how to use grasshopper in a way that engages you as a creative designer. We teach you Grasshopper so you can empower your own, personal design language.

Inclusive Practice.
We believe that what makes you different is your superpower, and we celebrate and welcome all intersectional identities – from neurodivergence, to religious beliefs, to disabilities and everything in between. We actively invest in and work to build an equitable, inclusive learning environment from the inside out. We encourage you to join our community if you share those values and want to learn from a company with a dynamic, diverse team and clients.

Why did I start hopific?

During our architectural studies, we all encounter Grasshopper in one way or another, either in software specific courses or we see it used to create flashy designs by our peers. Everyone is interested in learning it at first, but since there is usually not much training available beyond a few YouTube intro courses, people are either forced to spend hundreds of hours learning it on their own or they just give it up and rely on conventional modelling techniques for their designs.

I work in a internationally renowned architecture practice in Europe and in my office alone there is many coworkers who have always wanted to learn Grasshopper, but they didn’t learn it during their studies, and now, busy with day-to-day work, they don’t have time to learn it.

This is actually how this course started – I gathered a group of interested designers and did weekly workshops teaching them all I know, with focus on what is used in a professional environment. My students appreciated the fact that I was teaching them things they could start using right away to broaden their design skills or complete some tasks more efficiently.

What's different about hopific?

There are countless lessons and tutorials about grasshopper out there but I realized that most of them are focused on getting views and show content that looks eye-catching but that is of very little practical use in everyday professional architecture practice. Often it is very fancy organic shapes that result in mesh geometries that are next to unusable for a real architecture practice. Usually the instructor drops components onto the canvas one by one and builds a script from scratch. At the end as a viewer you may have built the same script as the instructor, but you had no real idea how to build a script yourself. That’s why in my course I explain the foundational knowledge about grasshopper that allows my students to start thinking and developing scripts on their own. Instead of only teaching how to build one particular script, I provide students with the process and framework to build any script they want.

While there are individual lessons and tutorials about grasshopper online, there is no comprehensive training program that will (truly) guide you from complete beginner to grasshopper expert. I developed the course curriculum in a way to cover everything you need to know about grasshopper in one place, in an easy-to-follow package.

Lastly, throughout my professional journey so far, Grasshopper has saved me so much time, and given me so many benefits that I want others to leverage its power as well. One of the main thorns of the architectural profession is the long hours, we’ve all been there. But I truly believe that we as architects can create great architecture without sacrificing family life or health, and for me personally, Grasshopper was a big part of it. Last minute changes are no longer something scary, the changes can just be a few clicks away if we use computational tools correctly. I want to make working in architecture healthier and happier by teaching how to do much more in less time.

Get started learning Grasshopper today!

& reach your design potential!