Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

That Was The Week That Was — 4th August 2019

The Entagma Houdini tutorials on Vimeo have been a great resource for my Houdini learnigs, and so I thought it was about time to stump up some cold hard cash to become a supporter of the Patreon page. There's even more great stuff once you pay for the subscription, as I found myself finally getting to understand how DOPs and Solvers work. A few hours later I had a self-replicating form being grown from a sphere, using the amount of curvature to dictate where on the sphere it grows from.

Talking of subscriptions, the latest Font of the Month came through from David Jonathan Ross called Map Roman Compressed. Not especially appealing to me, but still it all adds to my font collection and it's great to have a new typeface arrive in your inbox each month.

Had another call with the client about this latest project. All went well with very clear places I need to head down, so I've been working away on those, trying to get the right look and feel for this work as right now it's not there yet. When it's not working for me I find it best to go and do something else entirely rather than just bang my head against the screen hoping something will appear. The work is lacking narrative layers right now, and that's needed to add texture to the piece as a whole.

When I'm working on such things I often need to make palettes from brand colours that I can then easily use in other software. To do that I use a thing called Sip, which allows me to easily make such palettes (which I do for each client) and then export them out as Adobe Exchange format for reading into Affinity Designer or Photo as I don't use Adobe products anymore.

Elliot Jay Stocks — designer and founder of the magazine Lagom, emailed his interview with me which will appear in the next issue. Elliot did a lovely job of writing up our chat when we met in London earlier this year.

I had a few admin things to sort out involving conferences I'm due to speak at later this year, but right now I can sort stuff like that when this new work is rendering or if I need a distraction for a while.

One such distraction was seeing my new screen print — an A5 version of the poster that comes with Notes to Myself — go into production at Harvey Lloyd Screens. It's looking good.