Week 5
This week I finished my last Processing tutorials. I can now use all the basic functions and more importantly I understand how they connect to each other. When I look at other people's work now I don't just find it beautiful, I can also understand it. I can see which functions were used and how the logic was built. That felt like an important shift. I look differently at other people's work now, and also at my own. What started as learning a tool turned into a question about tools. Not just building a tool in Processing, but what a tool actually is, what its limitations are, and what the difference is between building one yourself and using one that already exists. Try this weeks tool below.
Category:
Processing Tutorial
Week:
5
author:
Renske Mutsaars
Location:
Rotterdam
Date:
The final tutorials
The most important technical concept this week was PGraphics. Running a sketch inside another sketch, rendering something and then placing it as an image inside the main composition.
This is the moment something clicked for me. I stopped thinking in simple layers and could suddenly think in systems inside systems. I could design things and then place those designs inside other designs. I could work with real depth, not just visual depth but structural depth, one process feeding into another. It made me think: what is the interesting part of a design? Is it always the end result, or is it also the structure behind it? In some of the later sketches I turned into tools you only see the final output. But inside those sketches there are layers that never come forward. A question I want to keep asking: where does the process go? Because with PGraphics it seems to disappear.
Rebuilding excisting identity - Boundary Analytics
I found the Boundary Analytics identity in the book Coach Crafted. I had seen it before on Pinterest and it always stuck with me. It looked complex at first but after the tutorials from the past weeks I could read the logic. Processing reads the brightness of each pixel and calculates a value to decide where to place something, a character, a shape, a form. I translated this from typography to geometry. First I blurred a letter in Illustrator so there was more difference in brightness and not just hard edges, then I fed it into a new sketch and it worked. This immediately gave me questions. Why did I want to rebuild something that already exists? Why couldn't I just download the tool? I thought about it and realised that by rebuilding it I did something I hadn't done before. I understood the logic from the inside. That felt different from copying the output or recreating it manually in Illustrator. Now that I understand the visual logic I can apply this way of thinking to other work too. Visually something unexpected happened. The blur wasn't just a technical step, it was doing something visually. Without it you would only have hard lines and no contrast in the thickness of the forms. By making the blur stronger or softer you get completely different results that I hadn't planned. A gap appeared between what I had in mind and what actually came out. A line started forming where I was no longer making the decisions, the tool was. That gave me a real question: when does the tool start making decisions for you?
Converting the sketch into a browser tool
Processing needs to be converted to JavaScript to work in a browser. I thought this would be easy because the languages are pretty similar, but the small differences made it hard as a beginner. I decided this was a good moment to use AI to do the conversion so I could focus on the design decisions, choosing the limitations and building the slider interface. Suddenly code that is hard for outsiders becomes usable by everyone. The moment the sliders were added it stopped feeling like my sketch and became a real tool. By moving the sliders and changing the tile size the results became completely different from what I originally had in mind with Boundary Analytics. It started looking like work by Lowlands and it reminded me of Karel Martens. The same logic, but a completely different visual identity coming out of it. This is where questions about limitation became real for me. If you would want to use this for an actual visual identity you would need far fewer options, the sliders would have to be restricted. When I look at the Boundary Analytics page in Coach Crafted I see minimal options. You can choose from 5 colours from their palette and have 3 options: representative, middle ground, abstract. No slider for tile size, no control over blur strength. All of those things were probably adjusted during the design process but locked in afterwards so the tool cannot go wrong. That is the whole point, the idea of a tool like this is that it cannot fail. But by limiting it that way there is also no room for creativity to come out. You are so limited that a new version of the design is unlikely to appear. Think about an update, a special edition for a festival. With only those fixed colours and options that moment would require going back to the designer. Which is actually an interesting loop, the limitation keeps the designer relevant. The sliders also have limits. If you remove those limits you have no rules anymore. Does that make it more interesting or actually less interesting because you need constraint to be creative? When I shared the tool with friends you could already see that everyone used it differently and got different results. Their outputs were things I never would have made myself. This is where my research question became clear. If everyone can use the tool, who made it? I came up with the rules, they came up with the output. How would you even copyright that? If I give them the tool and they make a poster with it, is the poster theirs or mine? Every output from the tool is unique, no two are the same, but they all come from the same logic. It is repetition without being identical. Is that what a generative identity is? Stable enough to be recognised but open enough to keep changing? And then: if I give this tool to everyone, did I even make it? Technically it is pieces of code stuck together from the internet.