After I made the tool for making them hyperbolic lines, Georg, was wondering if there was a way of converting existing, straight lines into hyperbolic ones. He had already started on his project and felt that re-drawing 500 lines by hand would be a rather tedious task whereby he asked me the aforementioned question.
In a response to Georg from Berlin I re-wrote my Arc-ee-type script. Well, not solely for him, it’s something I’ve had my mind on for a while, but he gave me an incentive. Much of the work went into making a stable GUI but also some other features such as the option to draw the arcs either on the in- or outside of the circle.
There are three ways of creating the arcs:
The script snaps to anchors as well so adding anchors to the circle could be an easy way of creating a regular pattern. Although not “officially” released, the script can be found/downloaded here.
A year ago, almost to the day, as I was searching for ways to procedurally make random street maps (of which I wrote a post here), I got wind of L-Systems which seemed like a good venture for Scriptographer. I found Aristid Lindenmeyer‘s, book – The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants – as a high quality PDF (available for download here). But somehow this whole undertaking slipped away from me and I ended up doing something else. When I finally got to it, I rewrote the whole thing in one sitting. As a matter of fact, I had very much help from an unexpected find and seemingly unrelated blog by Graham Bradley where he thoroughly explains how he made an Enigma cipher emulator in javascript.
Yesterday I registered an account over at FontStruct. I haven’t had enough time to explore or construct my own font yet as my computer have lost its will to communicate with my keyboard and mouse (both wireless) thus turning itself into a very expensive paperweight.
Fontstruct, on the other hand, seems pretty useful as an online fontmaker where creativity and playfulness are the catchwords rather than focusing on the minutiae of legibility and kerning. Each glyph is constructed out of a variety of pre-made, primitive geometric symbols.
Fonts from above: Sentinel by qwertyacme, Forerunner Dingbats by Uberdraco, Glitch Bats 1 by sfour, Intrinsic + by K_a_M_i, Seschat by Gvon, Cirlat by vydd, Brickyard by per1993, TII i by unttld.
The workflow is actually very similar to one of my own Scriptographer tools, about which I’ve written a small post here. The number of primitives have been expanded recently as well as the addition of a new feature here and there. Although the fonts created will probably be best suited as display fonts, I think it’s a really nice tool where one can try out various ideas without much trouble. It’s also great fun to just browse the multitude of user submitted fonts for inspiration. I will definately try out some ideas once my computer is working properly again…
I just ordered some back issues – five to be exact – of IdN a couple of days ago. Great mag with diverse, new topics in every issue. I first heard about it when Nine Inch Nails art director Rob Sheridan twittered about being featured within as a glitch artist.
It seems, for some reason, that Joy Division and Radiohead – well, Thom Yorke anyway – is the most popular bands for designers and illustrators when it comes to inspiration. I can’t say how many portraits of Yorke I’ve seen in different forums and mags, but guessing at double figures wouldn’t be far off!
The question I ask myself is; can I really justify a viable existence with graphic design as a hobby and interest if I’ve never heard more than two songs from either band? And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t that inspired, either…
Well, to be fair, Joy Division do inspire good design. For some, at least.
What Peter Saville did on Unknown Pleasures is briliant!
When reading about the properties of circles it would seem like a natural step to study (by study I mean, reading about it and pretending to, or at least, hoping to understand) the problem of Apollonius.
What it is, is that for any three given circles of arbitrary size and position, there are a set number of ways to draw a fourth circle sharing tangent points with the first three.
As a direct result of looking at Jonathan Puckey’s excellent Delaunay Raster script I started reading about triangles. Triangles may seem dull at first but if you look closer there are a lot going on here that many people seem to forget. There are also things that are downright incredible, for instance, Wikipedia states that: “As of 26 May 2010 Clark Kimberling’s Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers contains an annotated list of 3587 triangle centers.”
Some days ago I found a paper entitled ‘Procedural modelling of cities‘ written by Parish and Müller (creators of CityEngine), and was reminded of Introversion‘s game-in-progress Subversion.
Procedural generated cities produce some rather interesting patterns so I started to look around for more code and found the Suicidator City Generator, a free Python script for Blender.
I have just spent the morning adding a new feature to my Tile Toy script called Sparsity. I can now control how dense the pattern will be by telling the tool to favor empty tiles – or at least tiles with no connection – by a certain percentage.
