#NODEBOX IMAGE PROCESSING SOFTWARE#
#NODEBOX IMAGE PROCESSING CODE#

While I’m talking so much about NodeBox, I should mention some other cool tricks I’ve discovered. The pink elements in the new design, along with the drab gray background, I believe give me some leeway to get away with the bold red while sparing the reader from saturation overdose. It’s so strong, it’s hard to use it without overpowering the reader. But it’s a fantastic realization because I’ve long had a hard time designing (such as I do) with red. I don’t think I ever would have thought of using pink unless I just stumbled upon it as a variation on red.

One of the unexpected outcomes of all this experimentation and incremental design was that NodeBox helped me get comfortable with the idea of pink as a fundamental design color for my site. In my script I am also able to “guarantee” a certain spot to be a circle, so I can enforce some positional balance as I desire. The balance of colors and placement has to be nice. Not every one has to turn out perfect – with NodeBox I can just run it until I see a result I like. The quality of these sucks but it’s just because I scaled and converted them for easy demonstration in the blog.

#NODEBOX IMAGE PROCESSING CODE#

This time I decided to make it all work from code the way I wanted it, and am therefore able to randomly generate new banners at will.

#NODEBOX IMAGE PROCESSING SOFTWARE#

But I liked the results so much that I started almost immediately thinking of doing a similar design for the Red Sweater Software home page.

Letter locations are “nudgeable” by an array of x/y nudge parameters.Īfter much tinkering, I ended up with a solution that was close enough that I did a few finishing touches by hand and called it done.

For all other circles the color is rendered as a randomly color in the red ballpark.

If a letter is to be rendered at a given location, a circle is always rendered in a particular color (opaque red).

On an NxM grid, randomly choose whether to render a circle or not.

The logic behind the generation is basically this: So I thought I’d just abandon the scribbles and use all perfect circles. I had already toyed with plain circles as a means of giving the text in the design a little pop and stability. Second, I better stick with a red color scheme unless I want to change the name of the company to AquaGreen Sweater Software. First, the scribble look is cute but doesn’t give a clean appearance that I want to associate with my blog and business. So I decided to pick a more realistic layout for a banner. Pretty! Did I mention I love NodeBox? By now I was starting to theoretically consider my playful tinkerings to be the possible basis for a new blog banner. I decided to play with the little scribbled circles, add some color, and put them in a grid format with some blog-oriented text in them. You can only play with stuff like this for so long before you start indulging the ego. I made this example wallpaper using a grid of creepy guys:įinally I played with the crazy “graph generation,” which is a feature by which a nearly illegible graph is produced based on a specified list of nodes. It even includes some crazy “doodles” where it creates pseudo-random sketches of creepy little guys. I was playing with one of the NodeBox libraries called Pixie, which is designed to make simulated “scrawled writing.” Short of picking a color, this is about the only design I’ve ever done for it (and apart from the banner and some minor CSS tweaks here and there, it’s still Kubrick at the core!). In fact, my blog has been so “vanilla” in its design for the first year of its existence, that it may be inappropriate to even call this a redesign. Anyway, this is the story of how I liberated myself from Kubrick! (The default WordPress theme). I think I didn’t want to waste a whole post on talking about my new design, without giving some interesting facts about how NodeBox facilitated and inspired the design. I meant to write a post about it when I “made it live” a week or so ago, but I have been putting it off for some reason. I’ve noticed that people are slowly discovering the new design of the blog.

Nodebox image processing