During the easter break I’ve had some time to rethink my Design&Research topic, which was up until now the illustrations in children’s literature. Feeling that I’ve already exploited the most interesting aspects of it, I was pondering a topic change. A topic that I am very interested in is creative coding. However, I did not feel very confident about the challenge this topic would pose for a beginner like me. It took some days and numerous Youtube tutorials until I found that, in fact, it was not that impossible to accomplish.
This is why I finally decided to dedicate some of my free time to get back to Processing, revise the basics and dig deeper then. Generative design offers various possibilities for designers. On the one hand, the simple use of shapes and text allow for different applications in the field of graphic design. On the other hand, these generated artworks are not limited to a static environment but they offer possibilities of animation and dynamic visuals. These include dynamic and steadily changing displays of data that can be given to the program. This is also how unexpected, autonomous artworks can be created. All these examples of the usages of creative coding seem very appealing to me, however, only the deeper research and self-teaching process will show me the right field for my interests and my master thesis.
Somebody that very inspired me to get myself into this was Andreas Koller, whose works I found through my research about Processing. Besides other incredible creative coding projects, he has created a Processing Library called „Fontastic“ that allows you to create a typeface with the aid of Processing. Maybe this will be something that I can dig deeper into, once I am confident with coding in general.
For my future blog entries, I aspire to build a kind of library where I can archive important functions and look them up later. Maybe this can help some of you, too. Moreover, I would like to show you some of the tutorials that I watched and give a summary about useful methods and functions to remember.
http://code.andreaskoller.com/libraries/fontastic/
