Tagged: design
My department at MICA (The Maryland Institute College of Art), Interaction Design and Art, recently had a competition to design a shirt for the major.
The ring in the design was created in processing. My original design was a little bit more intricate and had four colors, but I think it still looks pretty good. If you want a free shirt, just come to mica and join our department.
For the past few months I’ve been hard at work building a flash game. As my first game (but hopefully not last) it was a bit of an adventure, but worthwhile in the end. There are certainly still details to be worked out and some extra features to finish off, but overall it’s come out pretty well.
First go play it! Then come back here if you’d like to know a little more about how the game was created.
I’m not one to preface my work, but I would like to mention that I am not a gamer in any respect. This being said, I may not be aware of all the game conventions I should be following, despite a good amount of ‘research’. If you have any tips for this or future games, feedback is always appreciated. You can leave public comments here or send me feedback through the Pulsus contact form.
Recently, thanks to a class with Jason Corace, I’ve become interested in games as interactive systems. In the same class I developed a card game and created Pulsus for my final project.
The game, Pulsus, is a puzzle game about particle systems. Players have to place objects to direct particles from emitters into goals. While it is a puzzle game, it is also about exploring a dynamic system.
In the game, players solve puzzles by placing objects onto the stage which effect the way the particles move. In each level the particles must be moved from particle emitters into goal points. Different colored goals accept only particles of that color. Particles must hit the goal quickly enough to fill it up, but once it is complete is will remain filled. The colored force objects will attract their own color while repelling others. Grey objects interact with all particles in the same way.
Read On (Post Continues) »Two pieces of mine are currently on display in exhibitions at MICA.
WikiWeb, a piece I created about a year ago is part of an exhibition of interactive work, Sight Sound Interaction (SSI4). The show is curated annually by Jason Slaon and is in the Rosenberg gallery on the second floor of the Brown Center. The project itself is an interactive map of Wikipedia. Pages on the site are represented by small points and links are are drawn as lines connecting pages. Any point can be expanded to show all the pages it links to. You can interact with a working version of the project on the project site or swing by the exhibition to see it and some other works.
The Juried Undergrad Exhibition is another annual show which features a wide range of work from students at MICA. This year I submitted a print from my ribbons piece. It’s exciting to see my work printed on a larger scale, about 36″x24″. To get the image for the print I added a bit of code to save the drawing as vector objects which can then be redrawn and exported as a PDF. The exhibition is in the Meyerhoff and Decker galleries on the first floor of the Fox building.
My department at MICA recently changed it’s name from Interactive Media to Interaction Design & Art (IxDA). Interactive media was perhaps an appropriately ambiguous name considering the work coming out of the department, but the new name is hopefully more self-explanatory.
To advertise the new name there is a t-shirt design competition, and then free shirts for all the majors. I’ve been working on some designs, mostly just typographic logos. This one looked half decent and I combined it with something I was working on in Processing. Here are a couple sketches.
This semester I’m taking my first formal class in typography. I’ve gleaned enough to do a decent job with it, but it’s definitely something I should do. So far the work for the class has involved a series of exercises, each producing a number of square compositions exploring letter forms and their interrelationships. In each we had a number of restrictions and goals. Here are just a few that I found more interesting.
Of course, after playing with letters in Illustrator for a while, I thought it would be a good idea to throw some letters in Processing. Processing handles text pretty well and the results can be exported as a PDF (vector graphics). The text will be rendered as text in the PDF. For scripts involving words I created an SVG file of the word so I could have more control over the type.
The next three used my particle system with a perlin noise flow field as in some of my other projects. Each characters’ mass is based on its size, but one character is also a little lighter than the other making them separate slightly as they are pushed by various forces. The noise field is also slightly offset in a third dimension to cause further separation.
Using a more recent iteration of my particle system I created these next two by replacing the springs with the word interconnection.
I used a cellular automata script to create this last one. Each state of a position in the array corresponds to a letter in the word automation which is also written out in the first generation of the system. With so many states the system becomes to complex to form any recognizable patterns, but I thought it was at least a little humorous.
Continuing with clocks in ActionScript I created this slightly less abstract clock, loosely inspired by magnetic fields. I’m happy with the way it turned out. I plan to create a screen saver from this as well. If you’re interested it should be available soon. Leave a comment if you have any thoughts or criticisms.
I had a few little battles trying to get everything functioning. Some functions in Actionscript 3 use radians, namely the trigonometry functions, while other more basic functions use degrees. Having to switch frequently between the two tripped me up a few times. Another issue, not directly related to ActionScript, was dealing with the different number sets. Each dial object has an array of text objects. Some begin with zero, so they line up with the array indexes, while others start with one and throw everything off.
Read On (Post Continues) »
I created this set of posters for a performance by the Ligetisplit Ensemble. The images are created with Processing. I had to finagle things a little to get high resolution rendering of my processing sketch. I set the screen dimensions to the pixel dimensions I needed, scaled up my inputs to interact with the whole screen, and had to enter expose or save the image to see what it looked like. It actually worked better than I expected.
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