OpenFrameworks Sketches

Right now I’m working on developing ideas for my final project at SFPC, which involves incorporating both Openframeworks and hardware. I’m hoping to create an animated typographic piece in Openframeworks, which then interacts with the real world through sensors. Then, I’m planning to send this data to a grid of LED lights. This project is going to be a huge challenge for me, but I’m looking forward to figuring things out. 

Here are some Openframeworks typography sketches that I’ve been making while trying to get ideas for my final project. Being able to create typography in a 3D space is super exciting for me. Having an X, Y, and Z axis makes a huge difference from just looking at your work in a flat 2 dimensional space. Another aspect that I didn’t think of before using OpenFrameworks is the idea of time as it relates to typography. It gives a sense of physicality into this digital type world, and I am trying to find ways to incorporate it.

Inspired by Muriel Cooper in Zach Liberman's class at the School for Poetic Computation. Sketch made in Openframeworks.

Inspired by Ken Knowlton in Zach Liberman's class at the School for Poetic Computation. Sketch made in Openframeworks.

Inspired by Zach Liberman's class at the School for Poetic Computation. Sketch made in Openframeworks.

Face Averaging using Open CV

This was a project that incorporated class material I learned from Sam Lavigne’s web scraping class and Zach Liberman’s Openframeworks class.

Often we point out the lack of diversity in the design and advertising industries, but it can be difficult to visualize diversity. To bring visuals to this issue, I thought making a portrait of an ‘average face’ of award-winning designers and art directors would be a good experiment to try.

To start with, I used Python to download an archive of portraits of award-winning graphic designers from AIGA’s archive of medalists and award-winning art directors from ADC’s hall of fame. Then using OpenCV to detect 68 facial landmarks, I averaged these points to align the facial portraits.

As expected, the average faces represented a male Caucasian face. Looking for a bit more optimism, I decided to average the faces of board members of these very same organizations in 2018. Here, I definitely saw a change. The faces started to tilt towards more diversity in terms of gender, although it still wasn’t representative of the demographic of New York City.

The source for this AIGA Average Medalist image is from AIGA.org on October of 2018. It uses 107 front facing images of medalists. 43 images were taken out due to low res/not front facing.

The source for this ADC Hall of Fame average image was pulled from http://adcglobal.org on October of 2018. It uses 118 front facing images from Hall of Fame. 51 images were not used due to low resoluttion or being being openCV compatible.

The source for this AIGANY Board member image is from AIGANY.org on October of 2018. It uses 23 front facing images of the board members and 1 image of staff.

The source for this ADC Board of Directors / International Board of Directors image was pulled from http://adcglobal.org on October of 2018. It uses 38 front facing images of the board.

Electronics & Hardware

This was a project that came out of SW&T’s hardware class at SFPC. The assignment was to use a 555 timer and analog circuitry to create a poetic project.

At SFPC, I often find that collaborations develop when we’re working in close proximity. Often we’re working late into the evening, working on class assignments. On one of these evenings, Eli and I decided to work on an LED cube with columns that would light up sequentially via the 555 timer. The next evening, while we were sharing what we were making with our classmate Tim, the idea for an impromptu collaboration was formed. Tim was working on a sound synthesizer that incorporated the 555 timer, so decided to we sync up all our projects! An Sound-Synth-LED-Matrix was born.

Sound-Synth-LED-Matrix collaboration with Tim & Eli