Week 3
This week I continued working through tutorials and focused on turning what I learned into more visual outcomes. Instead of only studying concepts and structure, I pushed myself to experiment and actually create sketches that feel closer to design work. Alongside that, I also attended a typography lecture which wasn’t directly part of my exercises this week, but did give me extra inspiration for how code-based systems can become tools later on. Please note the images are not fully optimazed so they might take some time to load on the page.
Category:
Processing Tutorial
Week:
3
author:
Renske Mutsaars
Location:
Rotterdam
Date:
Lecture about Typography
This week I visited a lecture about typography, recommended by one of my teachers. One of the speakers really caught my attention: he built his own variable font that responded to music specifically drumming. The font worked like a tool. It wasn’t just a “pretty font,” it was a system that changed live based on input. He built the letters from loose components that could be manipulated with sliders, and the shapes would change instantly.
I found this very relevant for my graduation project because it shows how typography can become a system that can be controlled and manipulated. I can immediately imagine using something like this for live festival branding: artists could type their name, and the typography would move along with their show. That would create a flexible identity that keeps changing and grows on its own similar to what was discussed in Code Crafted.
Tutorials that i did this week
Besides the lecture, I continued working through tutorials. I reached a phase where I wasn’t making visuals anymore, but mostly learning structure, functions, and object-oriented programming. Because I wasn’t being visually stimulated, I started to feel bored and demotivated. That’s why I decided this was a good moment to switch from The Coding Train to Tim Rodenbroeker. His tutorials are more graphic and design-oriented, and they give me new input for visual experiments. This week confirmed that I’m happy with that decision, because I made a lot of new work that feels closer to visual identity. Instead of designing loose circles and objects, I started experimenting with waves (sin/tan) and typography. I also practiced for loops again, but this time in a more visual way. I also picked up a set of screens for my work, which I can potentially use for my graduation project. Because these are rotatable screens, it immediately opened up new possibilities especially since they can be connected together to create one larger display. That makes it interesting to think about designing visuals not just for a single screen, but for a flexible installation where the layout can expand and change. In my sketches I mainly experimented with waves and typography. I made different studies using sine waves and explored what happens when I change the parameters. I also tested typography as a material, and I found it visually pleasing: instead of working with one fixed shape, you suddenly have all these letters to work with, which creates patterns I hadn’t seen before. Through these experiments I already tested how this could become a visual identity. Of course it’s not perfect yet, because I didn’t start with a specific identity or concept I just tested it with something random. I think if I actually have a subject or a real identity to build, I will be able to visualize it much better.
Potential tools
Other sketches also showed the potential of turning this into a tool, which makes me feel like it was a successful week and that I learned a lot. I do hope I won’t get stuck, because the next examples are getting more difficult and start combining a lot of formulas and concepts. I don’t fully understand everything yet, but I’m starting to see how things connect.
