Walk in the park, look at the sky: collected thoughts, processes and observations made during the course of making things

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29.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 29th March 2020
First week of full lock-down following the announcement on the Monday night. Watching the address from Boris Johnson was certainly "a …
08.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 8th March 2020
This week I've been working towards delivery of the static images for my new Trend Micro commission. Last week I had gone too hard on brand …
01.03.20 That Was The Week That Was — 1st March 2020
Notch is something I've been meaning to get into, ever since my friend Marc Theile mentioned it to me last year. As a fan of node based …
24.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 24th February 2020
Over the year's my desk has been host to many different notebooks, from the default Moleskine, to a super-posh Smythson Soho I picked up in …
09.02.20 That Was The Week That Was — 9th February 2020
A beautiful book arrived in the post this week from Christopher Grünberger. Analog Algorithm — Source Related Grid Systems, is a kind of …
26.01.20 That Was The Week That Was — 26th January 2020
With a new commercial piece of work starting next week, which will see me working in Processing, my thoughts turned to having to switch …
25.01.20 Creating Gradients from the Edge of a Shape in Houdini
This was something which had me baffled for a few hours. I wanted to scatter points onto an irregular shape, but control the scatter in …
16.01.20 Making The Art of Cybersecurity
A year on from when this work was commissioned, I thought I'd write up my thinking and process that went into The Art of Cybersecurity — my …
05.01.20 That Was The Week That Was — 5th January 2020
Every now and then I like to go back and revisit an experiment I've been playing with, to see if I can dig down further, to see what might …
31.12.19 Visually Setting the Depth of Field Focal Point in Houdini
When using Depth of Field in Houdini, I've always found it a little frustrating that you can't visually set a focal point for the camera, …
01.12.19 That Was The Week That Was — 1st December 2019
I started to drill down into my Code in your Pocket print project. As I began to play with the code I realised some of the iterations began …
10.11.19 That Was The Week That Was — 10th November 2019
I started the week commissioning a new screen print from Harvey Lloyd Screens, based on my process sketch — something that is often the …
10.11.19 VFX File Formats You Need to Know to Save Time and Space
VFX File Formats You Need to Know to Save Time and Space Nice write-up on VFX image file formats from Pluralsight.
07.11.19 Lowercase a
One of the things that drives me these days is need to go deeper, to craft, to drill down and explore the often delicate, finer details. …
27.10.19 That Was The Week That Was — 27th October 2019
After several days of wrangling with colours for the latest piece of work, liking something then a few hours later realising it was …
22.10.19 Exploring UV packing in Houdini
#houdinifx #generativedesign #generativeart #computationalart #codedart #typography #typefacedesign #typographydesign
20.10.19 That Was The Week That Was — 20th October 2019
This latest work is almost done, except now I'm trying to wrestle with these new colours that need to be incorporated somehow. My initial …
13.10.19 That Was The Week That Was — 13th October 2019
Much of this week saw me doing final work for the next Produced for Use release, scheduled for the end of October. I invested in a nice …
07.10.19 That Was The Week That Was — 6th October 2019
I iterated from the Voronoi fracture stuff I was doing the week before and decided to try it out with some typography, using the Crayonette …
30.09.19 Handy FFMpeg Automator Scripts
This is a follow up to the post detailing how to quickly convert sequential images into a movie using ffmpeg. Since writing that I've added …
29.09.19 That Was The Week That Was — 29th September 2019
More learnings this week in Houdini, as I dive deeper into Vellum, Houdini's soft body simulation stuff. For a while I had a series of …
29.09.19 Delicate Parisian Voronoi
#generative #houdinifx #typefacedesign #typography #generativedesign I created a group expression on the filled primitives using modulus to …
24.09.19 Sorting a CSV File With Vim
This is just a quickie but I wanted to make a note as it can come in handy. I had a csv file detailing population density for various …
24.09.19 City population density data rendered as type
#design #art #graphicdesign #dataviz #typography #typeface #data #datavisualisation #generative #houdinifx Using again the lovely …
23.09.19 That Was The Week That Was — 22nd September 2019
When I have a bit of down time I try and use that time to learn new things or new techniques that I might later use in my work. So this …
22.09.19 Grow
Using the Crayonette typeface from @djrrb #generativedesign #generative #houdinifx #typography #typefacedesign
16.09.19 A Simple Colour / Texture Map Creator Using Processing
When I'm working in Houdini or other 3D software, I might need to use an image as a colour map texture which can then be applied to a …
14.08.19 Adobe Alternatives
No longer will you find Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator on any of the Macs I use. You will find Premiere but that's only kept around in case …
11.08.19 That Was The Week That Was — August 11th 2019
My new print — Manifesto for Myself — arrived on the Tuesday from Harvey Lloyd Screens and looked fantastic. It's an A5 two colour screen …
06.08.19 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 …