hydra is another sketch in the typosseries of computational typography experiments. particles are first sprayed with the mouse to form the letters of the word ‘hydra’. the particles are interactive and can be pushed by clicking the mouse in their proximity, which makes the word oscillate between textual and graphical states.
the sketch is not optimized, so not-so-recent computers might have trouble experience the interactive text smoothy. if things are choppy, here’s a black and white video that shows the non-interactive result.
I decided to revisit the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This time I couldn’t help myself. I needed to find who was behind what Douglas Adams qualifies as the worst poetry in the galaxy. Paul Neil Milne Johnstone (aka Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings) might have felt like reaching for a towel and stick his thumb out when hearing his name in the original radio play. The name changed in the following evermore contradictory versions of the story. The poem Adams was referring too, in all its splendor:
beyond the raster is another type experiment, which extends the infest type. particles leave traces which fade away and continually draw to fill their host glyph, over and over, creating the smoky effect.
I stumbled upon Wordle, a neat tool that generates typographic designs from text input, while browsing some photoshop tutorials that use it to generate textual textures. Here’s an example of what it can do.
The first bit of text I threw at Wordle, without thinking about it, was “Hello World”. Because this wasn’t enough text to produce something interesting, it came to me that it might be time to update this common practice. Instead of the usual “Hello World”, shouldn’t we move on to a more substantial piece of text, however similar, “Hello” by Lionel Ritchie.
After playing for so long with digital type, I thought I might be time to start keeping track of my experiments, small and large. infest is the first of a series of typos.
A few minutes ago, I posted the first version of romeFeeder, a syndication management library for processing. When I started a small processing project that needed to use data from different rss and atom feeds, I realized the there was no library designed exactly for what I wanted. It is possible to use the ROME library in processing, library which romeFeeder is built upon, but I felt like some functionalities were missing, the process could be simpler, and the processing code cleaner.
Give it a spin and feel free to send comments, bugs and projects that use the library. It is still very early in development, and it will hopefully grow in the future as I and others use and abuse it.
A few weeks ago, I plunged back into digital typography, working at OBX, but also collecting and reading jots and papers on the tangibility of everyday reading and writing. In addition to latrinalia and graffiti, a third textual area came to mind, movie subtitles. After reading John Cayley’s article “Writing on Complex Surfaces“, which lead me to revisit Saul Bass’s work, I went back to an old cinematographic favorite, Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch), with its integrate animated subtitles.
Different movie formats are distributed with different types of subtitles. Hard subtitles are embedded in the video, soft subtitles usually come in separate text files and are rendered by video players over the video, and prerendered subtitles are placed in a separated video track, which is layered over the video at playtime, allowing for more complex and detailed effects.
Given the impressive results of the integrated subtitles of Nochnoy Dozor, it would not be surprising to see similar work applied to past and future movies. There is no reason why the creation of an integrated subtitle track be left to the original producer of a movie. There is a need for a new standard, more than a prerendered track, an extension of the current soft subtitle files attached to most movies exchanged online, which would allow video players to render subtitles dynamically.
