Project Details

This piece started with a desire to focus on color. I've struggled with creating color palettes in the past. Before writing any code, I spent some time learning more about color theory and practicing creating some palettes, even if I didn't end up using them.

For this project, I decided to play around with Poisson-disc sampling, an algorithm which I hadn't worked with before. Combining this with randomly subdivided rectangles to change things like colors made for some interesting outputs, even very early on.

I played around with changing the simple, circular points to render what I called "spaghetti" points; while I liked this, I also liked the simple outputs, and was a little torn as to what direction to work in.

Another thing I have struggled with in the past having too much variance in features, where some outputs I really like, but are very uncommon because they require certain variables to line up perfectly. I decided to create a handful of output "styles" for this project. Instead of having 100 different variables randomly assigned in each output, a style like the one below might always use outlined circles, no filled rectangle backgrounds, and use hand-drawn looking gradients.

It might seem counterintuitive, but by limiting variables for each style, I noticed outputs were more consistently "good". Below are two early styles I created, "Tubular" (tube-like shapes randomly wandering around), and "Hyperspace" (tubes zooming in on a single point).

Each time I added a new style, I ended up adding new features and variables. Once I finished a first pass of creating all ten of the styles, I had lots of new tools to play with. I iterated through all the styles again, sprinkling in the new features where they worked well.

All in all, there are 10 different styles, 15 palettes, and dozens of other features to explore. Finalizing color palettes was much easier in this project than previous projects because I put more thought into them earlier. I think there's a good variety of fun, colorful palettes and more "serious" ones.

Finishing touches including adding some controls for generating print-friendly images and fitting the image to the screen size. Each output also has a matching b-side!