Look at these pretty pictures I made:

more, more, more, more, more

They’re made by a short program… programatically. It’s generative. So I guess it would be more precise to say that I didn’t make these pictures, but I made something that went on to make these pictures. And each time it is run, it makes a different one—no two the same! Not to sell myself short, my choices as a programmer did greatly influence their final design. I think of this as designing at the second degree.

One difficulty with designing at the second degree is not spending too much time designing the first degree—that is, the program and all of the facets of software engineering that could be poured into it. One must instead be thinking about the final visual outcome. It’s rightbrain vs. leftbrain, creativity vs. analysis. These dichotomies must be managed.

Luckily, there are some braindeadly easy tools that help programmers forget about things like buffers and pixels and multiple coordinate systems. Processing is one that I’ve dabbled with before, but it’s based in java and frankly java isn’t very cool anymore. These days I’m playing with NodeBox.

Desktop Backgrounds

A forest of 10! (zip)

If you’ve got a 1440×700 pixel MacBookPro screen like mine, then you can use these as desktop backgrounds. Set it up to cycle through them every couple of minutes and it’ll be magic.

Burger King was not so bold as to assert actual Italianness. They’ve used scare quotes as an apologetic hedge, or so it seems at first glance.

Immersed in American kitsch in San Antonio’s tourism epicentre, I kinda wanted to buy a snow globe-entrapped armadillo last week. But. This quote from Boing Boing’s recent interview with Joey Roth has been ringing accurate to me, and so I passed.

“Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it’s still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long.”

Not coincidentally, Joey has produced the nicest object in recent memory.

Who says squashes can’t be delicious and decorative? I have approximately 7 million squashes gracing my counter, but the turban squash is by far the most attractive. Too beautiful to eat? Not in my kitchen.