Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Posts Tagged ‘artnano’

ArtNano (notes on Processing for design elements)

As I mentioned in my previous post, we were working with Geraldine Sarmiento on the ArtNano site, and she came up with the pixellised imagery you see throughout.

Towards the end of the project, I needed a few more of the pixelly images at short notice, to illustrate the essays and about pages on the site. Rather than bother Geraldine, I reached for Processing to see if I could match the look of the homepage imagery that she had created.

I came up with an applet that used a bit of blurring, a bit of distance fall-off, and a bit of perlin noise to create the effect that we were looking for (decorative, obscured, but related to the overall site). Here's an example of the imagery created from a picture of Scott Snibbe's Three Drops that we used on the page for Jennifer Frazier's essay:

Three Drops pixels applet

You can see the full applet and source code here, and I think it's a good example of how a generative solution to design elements can keep a project flexible right up until launch (and beyond).

ArtNano (notes on Wordpress as a CMS)

I recently finished helping out on the back-end of the NISE Network's ArtNano site for San Francisco's Exploratorium. Working on a 'straight-up' website is a rare departure for us at Stamen, but we're big fans of the Exploratorium and were delighted at the opportunity to work with them.

ArtNano: New Approaches for Visualizing the Nanoscale

The ArtNano site features contributions from several artists tasked with exploring the nanoscale. My favourites are Semiconductor's gorgeously glitchy 200 Nanowebbers video, Scott Snibbe's multi-scale Three Drops installation and Santiago Ortiz's Time Spiral. Also featured are artworks by Eric Heller, Victoria Vesna and Stephanie Maxwell.

If you're interested in that sort of thing, read the full version of this post for some notes on using the Wordpress blog platform as a CMS for a small website project like ArtNano.

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