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Drawing in Python

I’ve been drawing computationally with Drawbot in Python 3 out of John Maeda’s encouragement and teachings. Much gratitude to John… I’ve been posting some work-in-progress on Twitter, but thought it’d be nice to post it on my blog too as a nice collection of trials, experiments, fails, surprises, and some really cool things that came out of playing with code. 🙂 Stay tuned for more posts on this blog!

First up, this is one of my favorites so far. I love how the colors and dots spiral into this beautiful pattern. I love it so much that I made it a shirt and a sweatshirt on Amazon! Support art, buy a shirt today. 🙂 I got one to check out the quality and I can confirm that it’s very comfortable. The print quality is ace, too!

5000×5000 high res glory

Ballio wearing his computational art shirt.
It’s a real shirt! 🙂 Buy one today!

I’m looking to make more computational design shirts too! Stay tuned for more new designs.

In the subsequent posts, I’ll be sharing my fun exports mostly from Drawbot. As well as a few creative experiments I’ve been noodling with.

Check out more of my journey in computational art.

WordPress 5.0

In celebration of the new WordPress 5.0 release, I’m giving my site a new look! It’s using the latest and greatest Gutenberg-ready theme — Twenty Nineteen, designed by my talented Automattic co-workers and friends, Allan Cole and Kjell Reigstad.

Pretty sleek!

I am loving the flexibility of the block editor, and just how intuitive it is to see exactly what your post will look like. I’m still tweaking and playing with things, so more to come.

Another thing that I’m really excited about this WordPress 5.0 release is the release video! I had the pleasure to co-lead the creative direction on this video with my talented co-workers, Matias Ventura and Josepha Haden. We worked with the fine folks over at ThinkMojo to produce this video for us.

The result is an energetic, jazzy piece of animation that showcases the possibilities of our new block editor. Enjoy.

WordPress 5.0 “Bebo” release video

The video was even featured at the end of the State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2018. 🙂

Calder set in Caslon 422 set in Futura

Sort of a meta design. Using the unique shapes of Caslon, trying out some animation techniques of text fitting into paths made with type in drawbot.

It was pretty cool that Ace Hotel retweeted it!

Juno + Ballio

This time, I was inspired by Josef Albers’s “Interaction of Color” 

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color

For this exercise, I was experimenting with using random()for various fills and the type. I was also trying to see how animation, timing, and frame rate works in drawbot. Lots to explore and play with.

This reminds me of one of my favorite books we read to our children, Albers’s Squares and Other Shapes, before working on this design with Juno. Highly recommended.

Here’s the code if you all want to play with it:

NFRAMES = 50

for frame in range(NFRAMES):
    newPage(1000,1000)
    frameDuration(1/7)
    
    
# set a blend mode
    blendMode("hardLight")

# draw a rectangle

    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)

#    x    y    w    h
    rect(100, 100, 400, 400)


    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    rect(500, 100, 400, 400)

    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    rect(500, 500, 400, 400)

    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    rect(100, 500, 400, 400)

    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    rect(300, 300, 400, 400)

    # set a font and font size
    font("Futura", 200)

    # set a blend mode
    blendMode("overlay")

    # draw text
    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    text("Juno", (140, 630))
    fill(random(), random(), random(), 1)
    text("Ballio", (130, 230))
    
    
saveImage(u"~/Desktop/drawBotTest.gif")