Challenge

The Droste Effect (Dutch origin), known in art as mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself. Recursion is an important tool in parametric design processes. The challenge of this exercise is to get a feeling for what recursive programming is.

Hints

Take the supplied code and play around with the parameters. Try to predict what happens, before you alter a value.

Challenge

The Droste Effect (Dutch origin), known in art as mise en abyme, is the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself. Recursion is an important tool in parametric design processes. The challenge of this exercise is to get a feeling for what recursive programming is.

The challenge making such an “impossible” semi-3D drawing, is that the paths of the cubes need to be sorted independent from the 3D position of the cubes.

Hints

• Take the supplied code and play around with the parameters. Try to predict what happens, before you alter a value.
• Start a new DrawBotApp document, and retype the supplied code, while adding comments about what you understand that the code is doing.
• Verify the result with others, who did the same thing. How much of the comments is similar?

Challenge

In PageBot themes are containers of color palettes and their related functions. The script should write an overview of the existing theme palettes, organized in a matrix.

Resources

Download DrawBotApp and install PageBot.

Hints

Take the supplied code and play around with the parameters. Try to predict what happens, before you alter a value.

Challenge

Take an existing publication and convert it into parameters and algorithms. In this case it is a legacy type specimen. How do you translate the key map of late eighties into a modern glyph set such as Bungee-Regular by David Jonathan Ross?

Resources

Download DrawBotApp and install PageBot.

Hints

• Download the code, open in DrawBotApp and try to understand what it does.
• Play around with the parameters. Try to predict what happens, before you alter a value.

Challenge

The challenge of this exercise is to design a set of consistent parameters that generates different publications with visual coherency. Some aspects of the publications – such as purpose, size and technique – may change, while they remain in the same group.

Hints

• Take the list of most common visual parameters and divide them into two groups: which define coherency between publications and which can be divers, differentiating (e.g logo, color and typeface can be fixed, where the use of images and page size can change).
• Choose the parameters that can best defined in code, such as color, typeface and font size.
• Make sketches of what outcome you expect.
• Write the program in “pseudo-code” before you start coding Python.

These hints are by no means a boundary. But they help to focus on what the essential parts of this exercise are. Too many unknowns in the process will confuse.

Feedback

Feedback on code is relatively simple. If it runs in DrawBotApp without errors, then that is a big first step. Check the result to your sketches, is it what you intended as outcome? Then ask others for feedback and think beforehand what questions you would ask. Instead of Do you like it?, you probably get more feedback from Would you recognize these pages as part of one identity?.

Example 490-3

The “drawbot-snippet” version illustrating the principle of generative Corporate Identity design.

Example 490-4

This extended version of the DDS490-3 code gives more readable comments about how it works.