Shown here is a poster I designed to announce Playtime, an event at which Rietveld students presented games and other forms of play that had been developed in the ‘interaction design’ course. Playtime took place on 5 April 2006 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Post CS and was organised by Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters.

I designed the poster using an early version of Tile Tool, a design tool for Adobe Illustrator that I will be releasing soon.

In 2005 I created a website for Lectoraat Kunst en Publieke Ruimte (Professorship of Art and Public Space). Because they didn’t have a graphic identity, I felt it would be wrong to force them into a static form for the sake of a website.

Instead I chose to create a website with the idea of revealing the use of it as a public space. Whenever visitors click on a link they leave a trace in the form of a small graphical icon in the place where they just clicked.

A seemingly random background image starts to make sense when the graphical icons line up with the stories contained within the categories.

Currently we’re still measuring how full we can let the website become before we have to start taking old traces away.

Ever since I made the HSL Poster in 2003, which was basically one very long image of a train trip between two cities, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of transforming time based media to print. This fascination lead to Killing Time; an interpretation of a movie as a book. Maybe conversion is a better word, since the only manual part of the book is the binding.

I used the dialog to define the parts of the movie that I wanted to focus on. The images are constructed by taking the subtitles of the movie and using their timing and length to define the points of interest in the movie. I devided the frames of the movie into a grid of 19 horizontal and 10 vertical devisions. Time runs through the grid horizontally, starting at the top and going down. When there is no dialog, every subsequent block is 1 second (25 frames) apart. When a subtitle appears, time is slowed down and every subsequent block is 1 frame apart for the amount of blocks determined by the amount of characters in the subtitle devided by two. The vertical placement of the images in the book is determined by the position in the movie.

Although the explanation might be a bit technical, the images should speak for themselves. View a Quicktime movie of the pages of the book. (2.16 mb)

A quick run through of the techniques I used to make the book: The images were constructed using Processing. The typography was added in Illustrator using it’s native Javascript abilities and Scriptographer. The layout of the book was automated using javascript scripting in Indesign.

I constructed the story by sampling texts from news sites, message-boards, weblogs and newsgroups. Every step in the sampling of the text lead the story in a new direction and my role was to try to mould it by searching for fitting samples.

Because the story fragments fit together very roughly I wanted the form of the typography to both reflect this uncertainness aswell as have the fragments grow into each other. I also considered the resulting form of the typography from far off to be as important as the story was from close up. Every time a new sample was found I added it to the poster using my Text Pencil tool. I deliberately didn’t spend too much time deciding how the text should be set, leaving it up to the moment. The typographic distances between the city names is relative to their real geographic distance, which served as a good grid that sometimes made me force the text to fit and other times left it completely up to me to decide how the text should be set.

After the poster was finished I thought of a way to be able to replay the making of the poster. Since every letter is set as a different object within Illustrator, the history of the writing is contained in the layers of the document. I wrote a very simple little tool that deleted the letters one by one, starting with the last letter added (the last object in the document). By recording the screen while this process was taking place and then reversing the resulting movie I was able to replay the poster. To make the animation alot shorter I sped it up and split the writing up so all columns start at the same time. Because of resolution constraints it’s impossible to actually read the story in the animation, which is quite nice actually.

View the movie (20.3 mb)

Text Pencil allows you to typeset text with your mouse.
A demonstration movie

A small movie of the evening

Our Country was an experiment in collaborative editing of a fanzine. We (Peter Ström, Risto Kalmre, Vincent van de Waal, Celine Wouters and I) researched, discussed and implemented a new country on the online, “free-content encyclopedia” Wikipedia. Every week a new issue was made that recounted the history of edits that were made to the Wikipedia article. Before we had a chance to publish the third issue, Our Country was deleted by Wikipedia administrators: “[…] Wikipedia is not a free web-host, propaganda machine, or publisher of original thought.”.

Since we were deleted we decided to make a live beamed issue on the evening of the exhibition. We used the text editor ‘SubEthaEdit’ which allows multiple computers to collaboratively edit a text document. During the evening an unexpected stranger from Sweden joined the online text document of SubEthaEdit and we offered him to become our very first citizen. Several hours of text file rituals followed.

View januar_specimen.pdf

Peter Ström asked me to contribute to a specimen he was putting together for Januar, a font he had made.

The size of the text in the contribution modulates from small to large to small. After every modulation the amplitude of the modulation increases.

Thanks to Bas Jacobs from Underware for the idea.

Watch the lettering animation (Quicktime 7 required)

Download the full poster in pdf

This poster is featured in a compilation poster that Juerg Lehni made showing off different projects made with Scriptographer. It will be hanging at the Generator.x exhibition in Oslo from 23 sept - 18 oct.

Kiez21, an online literary magazine, approached me to design one of their articles.

The article I designed talks about Musicology, the scientific study of music. I created a system that visualizes the text by creating a proportional grid based on full stops, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, lists and paragraphs. First the grid is subdivided vertically by paragraph, then horizontally by period, and lastly vertically by comma. The article is read to the reader; it forces a rhythm by giving words screen time based on their length and whether they are followed by a comma, period, question mark or exclamation mark.

PSWAR / Public Space With a Roof is an artist run space in Amsterdam, Overtoom 301. Concept and design for their website in collaboration with Luna Maurer

At their exhibition space, PSWAR uses a filing system to organize their documentation. By using a modified directory listing we adapted this way of working for their website. PSWAR designs their own website by creating folders and uploading files.

A movie of a collection of pictures of shy people for a vj project together with News

This video requires Quicktime 7

The poster and invitation were designed using a programmatic design system called Paper Plus Plus (developed by Jonathan Puckey and Timo Hofmeijer). The designer is limited by having to execute hundreds of iterations of a set of predefined rules. At the same time his personal intuitive choice has a big impact on the result. The design process is divided in two: first the system is set out in a set of chance based rules, then these rules are executed by hand. The designer functions both as the designer of the program and the executor of the program.

Poster details used for invitations

Back side of invitation

Rules

Familiar Posters

Series on the wall

Series on the floor

A couple of series in detail

Typography by Experimental Jetset
Scripted using Scriptographer