I must confess that I am an addict. I have become addicted to creating computer-generated images. Having recently posted about Processing and Oxidizer, I have found another image generator called “Context Free.”

Context Free “is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.”

Creating images with the software is a piece of cake. One can download from a gallery of “grammar” files or create your own scripts. Downloaded scripts can have their output modified by entering a three-character code into the Context Free application, leading to millions of permutations of the work.

It’s a fascinating program to play around with and some of the output is simply stunning.

Best of all — the software is free, open-source and is available for Windows, OS X and various flavours of Unix.

Having read Smashing Magazine’s recent article, “35 Phenomenal Fractal Art Pictures” and being stunned by the images presented within, I wanted to have a go at creating my own fractal flame image.

A quick Google led me to the free OS X software, Oxidizer. A few minutes of experimenting and I was soon creating great fractal images of my own.

It’s great fun and I highly recommend you give it go. Post your best images in the comments.

Photo Credit: “Last Days of Autumn” by don2g

It’s that time of year when the trees turn golden, the sun stays close to the horizon and the early morning mist rolls down off the hills. That’s right folks, autumn is here again (fall for our American friends). The days are getting shorter and the nights longer and you’re likely to spend more time indoors than out.

In short, it’s the perfect time to “reboot” your weblog with a new design or feature set. Why not take inspiration from nature’s glorious autumnal colours and refresh your website. To help you along the way, I’ve put together this little list of website design “thingies” that you might want to integrate into an autumn reboot.
Continue Reading…

The epic history of the Blinkenlights project in advance of a whole new Blinkenlights installation in Toronto, Canada - Stereoscope. Learn more about Project Blinkenlights.

Found! A collection of decent desktop wallpapers of varying resolutions.

I am becoming increasingly impressed and intrigued by the multimedia produced with the Processing framework. There are some stunning artworks and videos emerging and it’s all serving to make me ever more curious about the capabilities of the system.

A lot of the work produced reminds me of the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST demo scene of the eighties and I find myself feeling terribly nostalgic.

But Processing isn’t just about art — the framework is also used for some very serious data visualisation too.

It’s all very impressive.

Further Reading:

The History of Visual Communication
Visualisations and Infographics
Information Aesthetics

An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way. [via]

Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. Ten recent developments in the field of user experience design are presented here. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality and in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.

We have always had an infatuation with the air above us and the space around our planet. With Photoshop we can create new images or enhance existing photos to include the sky and space as a backdrop. There is virtually no limit to what can be done with some Photoshop skills and a bit of creativity.