Hasta La Ideas

This hirsute bit of lettering was created by Chris Davenport using Nodebox, another in the increasing number of ‘digital sketchbooks’ available to designers

The piece was first uploaded onto our Feed section. Intrigued, I asked Davenport to explain a bit more about how he did it.

“Well basically Nodebox is a bit like Processing in that it’s a digital sketch book for playing with code, but it uses a language called Python,” he explains. “It’s not as flexible as Processing, and is mainly used to create static images and the occasional animation that can be exported in vector format.”

“Nodebox is really accessible and very easy to pick up and fiddle with, it’s aimed mainly at designers like myself who don’t have vast programming experience,” he continues. “I managed to do it in a day after never using Python before. It’s all well documented on the Nodebox site and there’s a community that helps with problems.

As a way of learning Python, Davenport created code to generate hairy type which he then used in a T-shirt design (above). “I was playing around with the different libraries and managed to combine a colour library that creates realistic colour palettes from one hex value and a library that allows you to import .svg images to manipulate with code,” he says. “I combined this with a snippet of code I found in the gallery section. There are variables that effect how the hair grows so I substituted a few of them with max and min values to create sliders so people can grab the code and have a play.”

So, in the spirit of open sourcing, anyone who wants to have a go at creating their own hairy type can play with Davenport’s code by downloading from here. Send us your best efforts and we will include them on the Blog or, better yet, upload them to Feed