Drawbot

The first week of school is officially over. It was a fairly relaxed week due to the fact there is a big typographic conference in England and a few of our professors are there. There have, however, been a few things which have been keeping me more than occupied. I don't have many pictures to show of what we've been doing and I gather that reading about things like digital revivals, and pointed nib calligraphy won't be all that interesting for the majority of you. So...I'll go straight to the good stuff.

On Monday we were introduced to the programming language Python. It's a language that is used in a lot of software applications including Fontlab. The idea is to learn how programming can a) make parts of the process much more efficient, and b) enable design possibilities that exist outside of the software's standard capabilities. To learn some basic programming, we've been tinkering in an application called Drawbot, which our teacher Just created. It's neat how just a few lines of text generates a whole slew of shapes. If you don't believe me have a look here (text on the right with generated shapes on the left):






I know, I know. The images don't look like much and you're probably thinking "he went all the way to Holland and dragged Grace along with him to make those". And the answer would of course be: yes. But, before you judge, take a look at this:




Do you feel like you just stepped into a warm shower and have pulled that gorgeous, rubbery shower curtain to a close? I'm not surprised.

Our teacher said that he used to give this assignment with the instructions "use some of the basic concepts covered and create a repeated pattern with them." He told us that after three years of seeing students return with quite marketable patterns for shower curtains he has rethought the assignment. The new assignment: "Create a shower curtain."