Val Head is totally into design, type, code, coffee & the internet.

The 2009 Feltron Annual Report by Nicholas Felton and Process Compendium by Casey Reas. Two amazing projects made wit Processing.

Calling all Pittsburgh design and artist types who want to learn to code! The awesome folks at HackPittsburgh are letting me use their space to put on a workshop I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: Intro to creative coding with Processing.

Processing is used by designers and artists alike to create works ranging from algorithmic illustrations and interactive spaces to data visualizations, illustrated magazine spreads and lots more.

This workshop is an introduction to Processing just for creative types! We’re going to spend the day learning the basics of programming by drawing, animating, and making simple interactive sketches with code.

The goal of the class is to give you the Processing foundation you need to start exploring on your own, and to inspire you with Processing work done by other artists and designers. We’ll have fun (and lunch) and there’s no need to have any prior experience writing code. Really, none.

If you’re a local artist or designer I’d love to see you there!

Intro to Creative Coding with Processing
Saturday, Feb 25th, 10am – 4pm
Tickets and more info

I came across this short post from Tim Brown today and I had to call it out because he hits on what I think is a very important point:

Diligence and reason are valuable, but “punk, DIY” freedom from measurement is also valuable. Part of our job as designers is to negotiate a balance between the careful and the care-free.

Yes! “punk DIY” is such a perfect way to describe it.

Web designers, don’t forget your DIY punk rock roots! Most of us are self-taught or stumbled into this industry because we thought it was fun. That’s pretty punk rock when you think about it.

Make things because you want to. Make things just to see what happens. Don’t be afraid to break the rules if they aren’t working for you. Hell, feel free to abandon them completely if they’re holding you back. We need that too.

If your design doesn’t follow to any particular ratio, design theory system, or current industry trend, that doesn’t instantly disqualify it as bad or wrong. If it feels right, it could very well be right. And that’s just as ok as design that results from careful bits of math.

The article Tim references in his post, Design, objectivity and the punk spirit, is also a good read on exactly this kind of thing.