Here’s my video documentation for the Serial Output Lab:
I was pretty comfortable with the material here, but I’d like to mess around with the frame rate of the processing sketch and try to get a graph thats a bit more readable.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
This week our assignments were to take the color hue test and to design a color composition. My score on the test was a 4 our of 99, 99 being a complete inability to distinguish color.
Here’s my color composition, produced with processing:
And the code is here.
Pete the Penguin
Here’a brief history of the logo, gathered from the company’s website and wikipedia:
- Brand introduced in 1955 by Munsingwear
- Abbot Pederson bought a taxidermied penguin and knocked the head off while he was on his flight home, then secured it back on with his tie.
- Brought it to a meeting where the company was trying to develop a logo to compete with Lacoste in the golf shirt market
- Len Birnbaum, Munsingwear’s art director was at the meeting and created the design
The second part of this week’s assignment was to re-design the ITP logo. Here’s a PDF with some iterations and my final design (click for PDF):
This week I designed my own Business cards. The first thing you probably notice is the size and shape. The size of the cards has a lot to do with the content. I want the content on the card to be minimal: my name, contact info and something to help the recipient remember who I am. Without making the typeface extremely large, the cards would have an overwhelming amount of white space. The design on the blue side of my card also fills much more vertical space than horizontal so the composition lends itself to a skinnier card. The shape comes from my inspiration here. The cutouts on the corners worry me a little because they could get caught when being slid into a wallet, but I think this could be resolved by using the right paper stock and possibly adding a curve to the edges, as seen on the Antidote X cards that inspired me.
In this weeks reading ”Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses),” there were several types of projects that I’m familiar with. Besides a few of them, I’ve had firsthand experience with these types of projects. I think most people are familiar with floor pad games like Dance Dance Revolution, multi touch interfaces and tilty controllers such as those in phones and the Nintendo Wii. In my last job, I ended up building a few Drawdio kits, a pencil mounted theramin device. The projects that are most compelling to me are usually the ones with the most sensory interactions, such as sound inducing theramins, mechanical pixels, some forms of tilty controllers and “fields of grass” projects. They all take advantage of at least one sense, whether it’s in a way that’s unique, like the theramin or familiar like the fields of grass. Mechanical pixel projects, like the wooden mirror take advantage of sight to create an image, as well as sound, producing pleasingly life-like sounds that indicate change. The specialization required to create these kinds of interactions usually limits the functionality of the project; all a wooden mirror can do is produce an image: but less specialized projects, like hand as cursor ones, usually produce interactions that barely take advantage of one sense. Sight is almost always involved, as well as sound, but these occur in ways that are screen based and typically don’t make the user feel like they’re interacting with a living object. Other patterns of physical interactions that I see repeatedly in life are swyping (like a card), turning (like a key), pushing, pressing buttons, sipping (like a straw), blowing and speaking.
Tone output lab documentation:
For this lab I ended up substituting a second photo resistor for a force sensor. Fun results.