Pattern & Animation with Python & DrawBot

A design festival for people who use type.

Typographics Festival

About as long as we’ve been making objects and marks, humans have been making patterns.

As we began to describe more precisely to each other our patterns and how to make them, we effectively started to code them. (In fact, the instructions for the first general-purpose computers were modeled on the punchcards used to control mechanical looms making patterned textiles.) Humans have also always been fascinated by movement, both actual and implied in the shapes of what we see and make. A lot of mathematics comes, not just from our experience with natural and human-made shapes and patterns, but also from our desire to describe and understand motion. Writing code is an excellent tool to explore both pattern and movement. You can start with a few elements and conditions—a set of shapes and colors, some simple directions and conditions—and use them to quickly cover a virtual surface, create countless variations and iterations, and set what you’ve made in motion. Explaining how to do this to a computer helps you understand what you’re making better yourself. And small changes—even mistakes—in the code, and unanticipated effects and outcomes, can sometimes result in something better than what you’d originally planned. They can help you discover new design ideas, directions, and possibilities.Participants in this two-day, online, hands-on tutorial workshop will be working in the free and user-friendly application DrawBot for the Macintosh operating system. You should have some previous experience writing code in Python—a two-day workshop or the equivalent is sufficient, and we’ll make sure to review some key Python concepts and methods with our first sketches. No previous experience using DrawBot is needed. You’ll learn methods for describing, creating, styling, positioning, and distributing shapes in patterns, with parameters you can adjust to alter the output. You’ll also learn different methods to animate your creations. There will be a dedicated Slack channel for the course through which participants can share code and output and ask and answer questions.Your sketches will produce high-quality vector art that you’ll be able to save as animated .gifs or .mp4 videos, single images or animation frames in .jpg or .png formats for further processing in other applications, .svg outlines to be sent to pen or cutting plotters, or .pdfs for print. You can use your patterns and animations for surface, packaging, and screen/interactive designs. Also, if you’ve ever been interested in generative and computational design, patterns and animations are a great way to get started.We hope you can join us!REQUIRED MATERIALS<ul><li>Macintosh computer running OS 10.9 or higher</li><li>Sketching materials, ie. sketchbook, markers, pencil</li><li>Reliable internet connection</li><li>Recommended: Zoom app</li></ul>Maurice Meilleur is a recovering political theorist turned graphic designer and design researcher and writer. He completed a PhD in political theory from Indiana University Bloomington in 2004, and earned his MFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. He’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he teaches and studies typography and generative design. He has contributed numerous type and book reviews to Typographica and Fonts in Use. He’s writing a book on Jurriaan Schrofer’s constructed scripts, and he’s presented his research at Robothon, ATypI, TypeCon, the Cooper Union, and the Letterform Archive. His experimental modular typeface, Kast, was a jury finalist in the Society of Typographic Aficionados’s 2016 protoType competition. Maurice explores digital drawing and animation using Python and Drawbot as part of a larger investigation into typographic representation and algorithmically-defined formal systems.

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Pattern & Animation with Python & DrawBot

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Pattern & Animation with Python & DrawBot

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