Ben Crowder / Blog

Blog: #experiments

Letterdrip

A semi-literary art experiment, wherein each letter gets assigned a color, the user types in a sentence, and the color bar gets drawn on the screen and melted up and down:

The colors are chosen by starting with a few base hues and then doing variations off them. Sometimes it produces gorgeous color schemes, and sometimes (okay, maybe most of the time) they’re jarring. What I should have done was start with a random hue, then build an appropriate color scheme (whether monochromatic or complementary or whatever) off of that.

I’m using a really simple dithering-esque algorithm for doing the melting (pulling from a random nearby neighbor pixel). Part of me wants nice antialiasing instead, but I suppose this has a slight 8-bit charm to it. Right now the left and right edges inadvertently end up pulling in some outer darkness, which I kind of like. (Oddly, though, it only happens in the top half of the screen. Not sure why.)

As usual, the code is on GitHub. There’s a live demo as well.

More examples, all using the default sentence (from Pride & Prejudice, unintentionally in honor of the 200th anniversary of its publication yesterday):


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