Week 25
A thought on new year resolutions, learning how to develop websites, choosing fonts based on personality, Gwern.net, The Creativity Code, an AI image logging project, displacing type & 2023.
Happy new year everybody!
I’ve missed out on 3 weeks of writing due to reasons that have been expanded upon in this filler article. However, as I sat down today on yet another Sunday morning, it feels like things are falling back into place once again. I can finally resume this weekly ritual and officially kick-start a new year full of learning, experimentation, inspiration and meaningful pondering.
[Conversations] The output will come if the input is right
As I entered the office on January 2nd, I found myself in the middle of an exciting conversation between Ravi and the team. Ravi had just purchased a gym membership and was excitedly discussing all the classes that the membership had to offer.
Considering it was the start of a new year and Ravi had never brought in a gym bag to the office before, I asked him whether losing weight was his rather clichèd “new year resolution”. His answer caught me by surprise.
Ravi said, “output ka pata nahi, resolution input ka hai … input sahi hai toh output to aayega hee”; which roughly translates to, “I don’t know about the output per se, my resolution is about the input … if the input is correct, the output will come automatically.”
What I found rather interesting was how a lot of people in the world have output-driven goals, like losing weight, but rarely ever make a resolution for the input. Ravi’s new year resolution is so simple: to eat less and exercise a minimum of 3 times a week, without being anchored to a fixed outcome.
As he said, “if the input is correct, the outcome is bound to come”.
[Learnings] Typography, grids and more for developing websites
Lately, I’ve focused a lot of my time on developing my new portfolio website.
I spent 2 years in college learning “UI/UX” design and now that I’m finally developing an entire website from scratch, I realise just how much is never covered in these curriculums.
A lot of my time went into reading about best typography practices for the web, the difference between em & rem sizes, understanding just what the heck are fluid grids to make a responsive website and even just how to get started with this whole process from a technical standpoint: do I make the website mobile first or do I adapt the desktop layout or do I make a fluid layout or use one of the many other possibilities that exist?
It’s been an extremely challenging process so far and I’m sure it’s going to take me a lot of time to figure out. Every night that I solve another puzzle in this mammoth project, I feel just a little bit better about myself and that’s quite a fulfilling feeling.
[Resources] FontBrief - Choose fonts on the basis of their personality
Credits to Simran Toor for finding this wonderful tool.
FontBrief is a website that recommends fonts on the basis of certain parameters that you can define. For example, you can choose if you want the font to be more neutral or expressive and FontBrief will suggest a list of fonts that meet this criterion.
[Fantastic Websites] Gwern.net
Gwern.net is the personal website of Gwern Branwen, a freelance American writer & researcher. The design of her website features fantastic typography, an extremely clean layout and a very distinct personal style.
She has broken down the design of her website in this elaborate article, which I found to be quite inspirational.
I feel I’ve reached the point where it’s worth sweating the small stuff, typographically.
[Lectures] The Creativity Code - Marcus du Sautoy
This is an incredible public lecture by Marcus Du Sautoy, made available by Oxford Mathematics.
Marcus talks about artificial intelligence in art, but in a distinctly different way than other people. Throughout the lecture, he tests whether the audience is able to distinguish between human & machine creativity with an ingenious live feedback-taking tool.
Towards the end, a pianist plays a piece that merges Bach and music generated by an AI engine (trained on Bach music) and the audience can almost never understand when a piece of music is machine-generated.
The positioning of his talk was never to compare the two, machines & humans, but to attempt to look at a machine learning like a human. In the end, creative human beings are also trained on datasets, much like a computer is. You are constantly exposed to the visual world, which you then abstract, and make your own creations from.
In a way, if imagination is all but fragmented pieces of one’s database stitched together to result in something new, why are human beings (including myself) so against the idea of computers making art?
[Projects] A Man Sitting on a Couch Looking at Something – Fred Wordie
This was a creepy, yet fascinating project to look at.
Fred Wordie, a “critical” designer in Berlin, programmed a piece of software that took a picture every 30 minutes from a webcam, processed the image into text by an image captioning algorithm and compiled it into a log; almost like an automated diary of the week.
You can find the project page here and an explanation + reflections here.
[Experiments] Breaking text into particles
For my new website, I wanted to make a graphic that would break up into tiny particles every time that a viewer did not move their mouse (to prompt them to explore more of the website).
Figuring out how to achieve this was a real brain cracker. The way I went about it was to create another canvas on top of the actual canvas on p5.js to place the typography, by using a createGraphics() object.
Then, the canvas is broken down into a certain number of square-shaped tiles. Each tile gets the pixel values of the original image within the space of the tile and then, each tile is treated as a separate instance of a larger, controllable object.
These objects can then be manipulated as you want; in this case, each tile has a speed between -0.5 & 0.5 pixels per frame and they bounce off the edges of the page. If someone moves the mouse, however, the tiles move back into their original places with a lerp() function.
[Direction] Life in 2023
As December rolled around, I wrapped up a year-long project titled 2022 - A Year In Films. To close out the project, I engaged in some intense & elaborate reflection which has been summarised in this article.
For this year, I have a simple list of 2 projects apart from my usual experimentation:
The development of my portfolio website and archiving all my computational & typographic experiments.
An hour of creative practice, every single day, that is away from the screen. Sometimes with letters, sometimes with film and sometimes with an exploration of self.
I hope you & I have a wonderful 2023. Good luck & godspeed.