Programmatic Design

A sample of designs created with Javascript for print.

REPITITION

Challenge:  Create a poster design for a hackathon workshop to rethink our fundamental concepts of economics called Beyond Scarcity.

Result:  The inspiration for this design came from the idea of rethinking a linear economy to one that was circular/sustainable. Each time the hosted sketch refreshes, the question and colors cycle randomly. 

RANDOMIZATION

Challenge:  Pick an existing piece of visual art that uses randomization as a key design principle and recreate it in code.

Result:  A Paul Klee painting recreation that employs randomization to draw the orange lines each time the sketch is refreshed. This is a single iteration.

BEER CATEGORIZATION

Challenge:  Design a visual system that to help beer drinkers understand the attributes of their beer.

Result:  I wanted to display 3 main pieces of information - color, IBUs, and type of beer. Each type of beer was categorized as an Ale (pentagon), Lager (square), or Special (triangle) and the aforementioned qualities were displayed on the logo. The color and type were visually indicated and the scale of IBUs was to be shown as a percentage of the total symbol. I don't think that this was a necessarily successful project for a number of reasons, but I learned a lot through the process. 

LOGO

Challenge:  Write a sketch that outputs a logo for a specific entity, that being a person, group, company, etc. The logo needs to be a dynamic design system - it needs to be able to have a range of expressions that can easily be tweaked by changing the variables in the sketch.

Result:  I designed a logo for the family of double-stranded DNA viruses known as Papillomaviridae. The family is geometrically unique in that it uses a pattern known as Penrose tiling to create its outer protein shell. I've incorporated into the design of each of the members indications of their size, genome size (in kb), and several other factors that can dictate size or color. The code can been seen here.

TYPOGRAPHY

Challenge:  Design a typeface based on the meaning of a word. 

Result:  Instead of creating a typeface, I decided to use words as an inspiration for the design, specifically these words. This stream of consciousness short story strongly evokes emotions of nostalgia and brings an awareness to the sadly beautiful truth that memories fade. Code here.

COLOR

Challenge:  Make a design for the word tense.

Result:  I focused on 2 aspects -- a severe point and dark, deep color schemes.