Graphics

In which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners.

Design / Prototype / Code

This portfolio is a glimpse at the way I design and prototype in code. Design something familiar, program it to do something unexpected, make sure people feel something.

Designed by Scott Morgan (aka Loscil) and Craig McCaffrey, [the Colours of Air album cover]'s background fades downward from a light pink to a deep magenta, atop which is a dense field of horizontal white lines whose various contortions subtly suggest folds in a piece of paper. I spoke with Scott over email about how he arrived at this image, and while his process was more subconscious than strategic, the result feels entirely representative of the music in some ineffable way.

I stared at it a lot, fascinated by how these simple, mechanical lines not only introduce an uncanny third dimension, but also evoke striations in muscle tissue, geological formations, and topographic maps. Inevitably, I wondered if a system could be extrapolated from it to generate variations, and I soon found a path forward.

A reproduction of Oliver Byrne’s celebrated work from 1847 plus interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

13pt is the work of Jonathan Corum, an information designer and science graphics editor at The New York Times.

Some of my best friends are designers. But I think we can all agree that - however well-meaning - they can be a little obsessive. Whether it is fretting over tiny details, or trying to align to a grid which doesn't exist, or spending time removing useful affordances in the name of æsthetics - they always find a way to make something prettier at the expense of usability.

Google used to have some beautiful logos for its apps. Each had a distinct shape, style, and colour. Then, someone decided that they all needed a consistent visual language. And this mess was born.

Andrew Trousdale is a researcher and designer. His initiatives and projects bridge positive psychology, human-computer interaction, and the creative arts.

The series of scribbles I’ve generated here is obviously nowhere near the level of sophistication of artificial intelligence. But it does live somewhere in the uneasy realm of computers pretending to be human. We’ll all be living in that realm eventually. Here’s hoping that against the odds, it’s a harmonious one.

A few of Cosgrave’s illustrations for Saint Exupery’s 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars.

Months ago, I was pondering ways to improve my photoessays. My posts had focused almost purely on the photos and the stories. I felt that describing the gear used would be an improvement since gear is a small but integral factor.

I was considering listing out cameras and lenses at the end of each post. That’s when I remembered my previous drawings of cameras. I decided an illustration with a legend would be a welcome addition.

The pipeline that transforms three.js code to pixels looks like this:

1. three.js JavaScript code is executed on the CPU
2. Shader code is executed on the GPU
3. Pixels are rendered on the screen

A shader has two parts, a vertex and fragment shader. They work like this:

1. Each vertex runs through the vertex shader to get its viewport space position.
2. Primitives are converted into fragments. Fragments are data corresponding to a potential pixel.
3. Each fragment runs through the fragment shader to get its color.

I’m absolutely not going to try to teach you raytracing, but I’ll try to give you a 10,000 foot view.

...A good analogy from [Computer Graphics from Scratch by Gabriel Gambetta] is if you held a screen out in front of you and looked through each hole in the screen from a fixed viewpoint. Left to right, top to bottom. When you looked through that one hole, what did you see? Color a corresponding point on a canvas with that color paint. You might see nothing but sky in the top row of the screen, so you’d be doing a lot of blue points on the canvas. Eventually you’d hit some clouds or trees and do some white or green dots. Down lower you might hit other objects – buildings, a road, grass, etc. When you worked through all the holes in the screen, you’d have a completed painting. If you understood that, you understand the first level of raytracing.

Box shadows. I love them.

Four years ago I found out my m1 can render a stupid number of these bad boys and so I set out to see just how far you can push them and boy did I. If you are looking for a how to use box shadows to get the look of the latest UX trend, this is not the right article for you. But if you like some janky creativity, stay tuned.

I want to share some of the worst possible things one can do with box shadows all on a single div. Things which shouldn't work at all yet somehow they do.

In the past ten years, the computer has thoroughly transformed graphic design practice. But this book is about a different revolution, a second computer revolution. Now computers are transforming a deeper level of visual communications fundamentals, becoming more than a sketching, composition and production tool for graphic design. Electronics are becoming communications’ delivery medium, the context, the content and a conceptual world as well. This form of graphic design is no longer linear and two dimensional. It is hyperfluid and six-dimensional, adding the dimensions of real time, motion, sound and interactivity to our two traditional XY coordinates.

...This vast field desperately needs to define its process and professional content– a philosophy and curriculum, and an identity. It even needs a name. The terms “new media” and “multimedia” are problematic, their vagueness and ambiguity contributing to the misconception that anyone familiar with the software tools is qualified to practice in it. “Computer graphics” and “website design” describe the product rather than the conceptual process of designing.

The semantic system of graphical relations.

The graphical expression of semantic relations.

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The first words placed define the space.

A translation is given of Truchet's 1704 paper showing that an infinity of patterns can be generated by the assembly of a single half—colored tile in various orientations.

The NASA Graphics Standards Manual by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn is a futuristic vision for an agency at the cutting edge of science and exploration.

The book features a foreword by Richard Danne, an essay by Christopher Bonanos, scans of the original manual (from Danne’s personal copy), reproductions of the original NASA 35mm slide presentation, and scans of the ‘Managers Guide’, a follow up booklet distributed by NASA.

Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.

I always loved the visual aesthetic of dithering but never knew how it’s done. So I did some research. This article may contain traces of nostalgia and none of Lena.

Oscillations - Harmony - Minimalism - Multitude

Tapedeck.org is a project of neckcns.com, built to showcase the amazing beauty and (sometimes) weirdness found in the designs of the common audio tape cassette. There's an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60's functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70's audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80's and 90's.

Picture the last time music moved you. Imagine how the sound was amplified. Think about what initially drew you to that album cover or concert poster. How did design shape your experience?

Explore this question with us in Art of Noise. This exhibition is a multi-sensory ode to how design has changed the way we’ve experienced music over the past 100 years.

At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a type of Teletext graphics system that displayed rudimentary vector graphics.

...My ongoing research into early Japanese pixel art software shows that Barbara most likely used ASCII’s エアーブラシ “Airbrush” painting software on the NEC PC-100, as it is the only graphics software for that platform I’ve been able to find advertised for sale or featured in period literature.

Restoring the colors in the transparent parts reveals that the expression was originally a smile, and that the leaves were originally pristine before being changed to damaged. This was possibly considered by the developers to look too much like a friendly NPC and not enough like an enemy, resulting in the changes made for the finished game.

Design details that feel like magic.

Observable Framework is an open-source static site generator for data apps, dashboards, reports, and more. Framework includes a preview server for local development, and a command-line interface for automating builds & deploys.

You write simple Markdown pages — with interactive charts and inputs in reactive JavaScript, and with data snapshots generated by loaders in any programming language (SQL, Python, R, and more) — and Framework compiles it into a static site with instant page loads for a great user experience.

...Framework includes thoughtfully-designed themes, grids, and libraries to help you build displays of data that look great on any device, including Observable Plot, D3, Vega-Lite, Graphviz, Mermaid, Leaflet, KaTeX, and myriad more. (And for working with data, don’t forget about Arquero, DuckDB, and SQLite, too.)

APL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.

APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.

The EPA Graphic Standards System is one of the finest examples of a standards manual ever created. The modular and flexible system devised raised the standard for public design in the United States.

The book features a foreword by Tom Geismar, introduction by Steff Geissbühler, an essay by Christopher Bonanos, scans of the original manual (from Geissbühler’s personal copy), and 48 pages of photographs from the EPA-commissioned Documerica project (1970–1977).

A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication.

Topics include:

• Definitions, history, and potential.
• Visual Iconography and its Effects.
• Closure, reader participation between the panels.
• Word-picture dynamics.
• Time and motion.
• The psychology of line styles and color.
• Comics and the artistic process.

Sutnar’s structural systems for clarifying otherwise dense industrial data placed him in the pantheon of modernist pioneers and made him one of the visionaries of what is today called information design. Visual Design in Action is a snapshot of Sutnar’s American period (1939–1976). The publication is a testament to the historical relevance of modernism and the philosophical resonance of Sutnar’s focus on the functional beauty of total clarity.

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode.

...The white-background icons simply become black-background icons. Maps utilizes a dark mode color palette from the app itself, Weather turns the sky black, but oddly keeps the sun rather than switching to the moon. This could be a rule Apple enforces only for themselves, where their app icons won’t change shape, only coloration. The Photos petals are now additive color rather than subtractive.

Unfortunately, some icons appear to have lost or gained weight in dark mode. For example, the Settings gear didn’t change size in dark mode, but it appears to occupy less space because the dark circle around it blends with its background. That makes it appear smaller than the Find My icon, which now looks enormous next to FaceTime. This is a remnant of some questionable design choices in iOS 7 that have lingered now for the last decade.

In 1986, Steve Jobs paid renowned graphic designer Paul Rand $100,000 to create a logo and visual identity for his computer company.

Paul Rand developed a unique 100-page proposal book for the NeXT logo that walked the reader step-by-step through the conceptual process to the final outcome.

In computer graphics, stochastic methods are so hot right now. All rendering turns into calculus, except you solve the integrals by numerically sampling them.

...This post is about how I designed noise in frequency space. I will cover:

• What is blue noise?
• Designing indigo noise
• How swap works in the frequency domain
• Heuristics and analysis to speed up search
• Implementing it in WebGPU

The boojum pattern is what remains after a more symmetric pattern has softly and suddenly vanished away.

The Basic Course was a general introduction to composition, color, materials, and three-dimensional form that familiarized students with techniques, concepts, and formal relationships considered fundamental to all visual expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting, or lettering. The Basic Course developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for any artistic endeavor.

Problem statements / Truthful reports / Explaining cause and effect is highest form of knowledge / Nonfiction reports and presentations: fundamentals / Show information that is relevant, credible, honest / No cherry-picking, no lemon-dropping, no confirmation bias / Context and comparisons essential / Presenters and their audience / Efficiency in communication / Credibility and truth in presentations: the necessity of skepticism / High quality measurement and research design are a necessity for truth and presenter credibility / Effectiveness of approximate measurements and models / Real-time 2D/3D images and data analysis heart surgery; exemplary interface for data visualization, machine learning, imaging / Case study: authentic representation of data and uncertainties in real science / Data and measurements: audits and detective work essential / Survival bias / Signal and noise / Color scales as signal and noise / Pitching and hyping corrupts signal / Poshlust = pretentious banality / 20 case studies / Apple decision meetings / Amazon and AWS meetings begin with 30 minute silent reading of a 6-page document (ET invention): the key goal is to seek the truth, ideas not presenters matter most / News story: Why is the Potomac so dangerous? / Doctor patient communication / Important decisions in senior faculty meetings / Teaching is not reading slides aloud to students / Remodeling teaching / Engineering by PowerPoint: Columbia shuttle accident, close readings reveal problems with evidence and conclusions

Reading Design is an online archive of critical writing about design. The idea is to embrace the whole of design, from architecture and urbanism to product, fashion, graphics and beyond. The texts featured here date from the nineteenth century right up to the present moment but each one contains something which remains relevant, surprising or interesting to us today.

So @StableDiffusion has various options and controls and one of the main ones is the sampler used for generation. Let's talk a little bit about these samplers since this has some interesting and unexpected effects on generated image quality.

In 1923 Kandinsky proposed a universal correspondence between the three elementary shapes and the three primary colors: the dynamic triangle is inherently yellow, the static square is intrinsically red, and the serene circle is naturally blue.

The series ▲■● represents Kandinsky’s attempt to prove a universal correlation between color and geometry; it has become one of the most famous icons of the Bauhaus. Kandinsky conceived of these colors and shapes as a series of oppositions: yellow and blue represent the extremes of hot/cold, light/dark, and active/passive, while red is the intermediary between them. The triangle, square, and circle are graphic equivalents of the same polarities.

There is something about the aesthetics of NFTs — not a sameness, exactly, but a particular deficiency of which they all partake, such that even though they look different, they all manage to suck in the same way. It’s tempting to say they suck the way everything sucks now, but it’s more like how one particular strain of American aesthetics has sucked for the last 20 years. NFTs are the human capacity for visual expression as understood by the guy at the vape store.