What Peter Saville did on Unknown Pleasures is briliant!

But maybe I’m speaking too soon, as when I started writing scripts for Scriptographer, the first thing I did was a complete ripoff of Jürg Lehni‘s Faust.

I called my script Saville Raster… So, I guess I’m as guilty as everyone else!
And if that wasn’t enough. Peter Crnokrak made a nice poster showing the huge number of covers of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart which was featured in the book Data Flow that I recently bought.

That, and Similar Diversity, a project by Philipp Steinweber and Andreas Koller also featured in the book caught my eye as I really liked the arcs – or, rather, lines in hyperbolic geometry.

After a quick look at Wolfram MathWorld on how to calculate the Poincaré Hyperbolic Disk a new idea spawned in my mind.

Fortunately it’s easier to calculate the arcs when dealing with vectors instead of coordinates as they can be created using its length and angle.

My intended project, although it’s a few months off in the future, will rely heavily on these arcs to create some interesting (at least in my mind) infographics.

And as for the music? Well, there are other bands…

The Saville Raster was the first script I wrote for Scriptographer, though I have to admit that I had alot of help from a friend.

The idea wasn’t my own. Jürg Leni, creator of the Scriptographer plugin, had commissioned a script, called Faust, that produced this effect for an artist and the script wasn’t published on the site. Alot of people in the forum had expressed a desire for this script and I thought that if the Faust script couldn’t be released due to some reason or other that wouldn’t stop me from posting my own version. I really liked it too and figured that this couldn’t be all that hard to do so I sat down with a friend, with a much higher understanding of javascript than me, and started scripting.

It didn’t take long and the result was very satisfying and really sparked a new interest in trying to use Illustrator as a tool for more procedurally generated art/design, such as Processing or NodeBox/NodeBox 2. I named it Saville Raster after its strong resemblance of Peter Saville’s iconic album cover for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures.

Unfortunately, just a day or two after posting the script, I was contacted by Jürg who felt, although glad I had started using Scriptographer, obliged to remove the script. We exchanged some mails and sorted it all out.

If anything, I felt kind of flattered by the whole thing.