Introduction
In 2014, a new conference emerged in the heart of NYC dedicated to new processes for materials, industrial and consumer products. Biofabricate concentrates on bringing together artists, researchers, designers, academics, biotech startups and biohackers to further the field of biofabrication.
The founder, Suzanne Lee, commissioned me to create a logo that would reflect the innovative conference’s mandate of bringing together design, biology and technology to create a new paradigm for the production of products. Interested in my 365 Processing project where I visualize algorithms, we narrowed down one particular sketch that had the feeling of living organisms manifesting within a system.
Reference and Inspiration
Day 133 of 365 Processing was the chosen sketch as the reference point for this project. The underlying form is made apparent as particles are drawn to the canvas. A flow field is dictating the final position of the particles while the form is created by connecting nearby particles to one another with lines. The closer the particles, the darker the line and the further away, the fainter the line. The sketch’s code and concepts are derived from The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman.
Process
Unsure on how to translate the reference sketch into a typographic form, I decided to start exploring a Processing library called Geomerative. The library allows you to access the type paths and points of a given font. The first few programs were rigid and lacking the organic feel from the reference sketch.
The final solution was hand drawing the letterforms in Adobe Illustrator and importing the SVGs to Processing. The SVGs acted as the path for the particle system to travel along while it emitted particles that moved to a location on the font path. To simulate a generative program, I created five different SVGs for each letter and each time the program restarted, a random SVG is called for the path. This means that the logotype can exist in 244,140,625 different variations.
