Yesterday, I had a little talk with my internship companion at Vorm Vijf. The day before, an intershop booklet from the kabk had arrived, including an evalution form.
After analyzing (read; criticizing) the booklet, he read the evalution form but decided to not fill it in untill the end of my internship, which makes sense. However, he predicted that there aren�t going to be any insufficient number. The only thing�but the studio carries part of the blame for that, he said�is that my specialisms (regarding computer knowledge, et al.) haven�t really flourished.
He realized that they, as a studio, could also learn a great deal from me in that sense, but that they haven�t really been able to pull it out. My part of the blame lies in that I didn�t come forward�sharing my views from another perspective�as boldly as I could have, but basically limited my role to the one that was explicitely been measured on.
He broke the somewhat serious tone by joking that I still have three more weeks to change things around � and that is exactly what I am goingstarted to do.
Recently, I have been working on the new corporate identity for the ndd of ndl full-time. I had already started a little setup for the new website earlier this week (and two representitives had came to the studio, and they seemed very content with what they saw), but now was the time to start pulling it a bit more.
The first new (semi-tech-savvy) thing I did was write and implement a little php function that replaces (not�so�tech�savvy�user inputed) abbreviations like NDD
(in capitals) with
(set in lowercase). Accompanied with a little style rule�<abbr>ndd</abbr>abbr { font-variant: small-caps }�this causes abbreviations to be rendered in small caps: a little typographic detail that makes for a more �sthetic (and professional) look. (I don�t have to mention the semantic
correctness, right?)
I didn�t feel I was pushing this one quite far enough though.
We [my internship companion and I] had been using the type face Distribution
�that I had constructed for this identity (yes, constructed) a couple of weeks earlier�for expressions of the corporate. I also tried to use the grid on which the type face was based in my designs as much as possible. This principle of constructing�in the sense of making variations, based on limitations�particularly provides opportunities to integrate more technical disciplines.
I decided to reproduce the grid�that I had originally created in Illustrator, using line and shape drawing tools; a lot of copy � paste�
; and the numeral input fields�in Python, using DrawBot as an enviroment. The code is fairly simple:
size(480, 480)
print "Distribution"
x = 0
y = 0
size = 48
n = 6
for j in range(n + 2):
y = y + size
x = 0
for k in range(n):
x = x + size
c = Color(0, 0, 0, .25)
c.set()
r = Oval(x, y,
size, size)
r.stroke()
x = size / 2
y = size / 2
size = size * 2
for k in range(n + 1):
y = y + size / 2
x = 0
for l in range(n):
x = x + size / 2
c = Color(0, 0, 0, .5)
c.set()
r = Oval(x, y,
size, size)
r.stroke()
�and the results are great:
The pdf output was actually better than the original eps I had constructed manually
in many ways. The only part where it is lacking is the placement of the anchor points:
| Original eps (constructed) | Python psd (rendered) |
|---|---|
You can see that the anchor points in the rendered version are not on the dimensional extremes (which they should be). Currently, I am not sure whether the problem lies in Python, DrawBot, or psd. According to DrawBot developer Just van Rossum, the problem lies in the way either Cocoa or CoreGraphics (Mac OS X) deals with this.
Today, I thought to myself why stop at automating the grid?
I decided to started enhancing the code, so that it is capable of choosing and placing elements (including this year�s ndd theme: Vele wegen leiden naar Rome
, set in my Distribution
type face): randomly, but within limits. Here are some png outputs of the same code:
�you get the point.
These aren�t actually usable yet, but the foundation is set. The objective now is to make the code more intelligent, so that it gets some sense
of �sthetics and usability.
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