#1: Cutting tobacco | Excelling at art | If Tufte webbed | Design & fiction
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
Welcome to my newsletter of intersections and uncategorisations. You can read the introduction to find out a bit more about what will be a regular digest of thoughts inspired by my major interests and a subscriber-only set of mailings that reveal more of my personal creative journal and process.
art | science | tech
Journal: Cutting tobacco
[Lasercut tobacco leaves prepared for a festival talk.]
In a few weeks, my plant biologist collaborator Zach LeBlanc and I will be presenting at the Pint of Science Festival in Brisbane about our joint work. We play with a whole range of techniques and applications at the interplay of art and plant biology but decided to do a new experiment for the festival.
There are lots of different ways of culturing and growing plant cells, of course, but we are figuring out some new techniques for doing a particular science experiment. As a byproduct, we have been looking at some rapid growth of pieces of tobacco leaves (a well understood species) and decided to make a version that we can start growing now and then show still growing at the festival.
These leaves are lasercut to various designs including a version of the festival logo, a tree (because why not?), and the logos of our universities (gotta get funded somehow!)
The pieces are all reversed because we cut them one side up so that they would lie flatter in the laser cutter but then the Zach realised that they’ll grow better reversed because there is a greater concentration of stomata on the underside of leaves. (Stomata are pores that regulate gas exchange.) Placing them the other side up might make them dry out quicker or inhibit uptake of the media they are growing on. We could have just flipped the lasercutting design but didn’t think that bit through properly ahead of time. This is why we experiment!
[Note: This is the kind of work-in-progress I’ll be showing in my subscriber journal but it will have a bit more discussion and information about what I’m up to.]
art | tech
Excelling at art
[A painting made entirely in Microsoft Excel by Tatsuo Horiuchi.]
The other day I was visiting my mother (Hi mum!) and seeing one of her paintings of a Japanese garden reminded me of something from a while ago. There is a whole subfield of tech art that involves drawing with spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel. Many of the early versions of this involved colouring each spreadsheet with a specific fill colour as large pixels in a low-res image. Although the originals were done by hand, it didn’t take long before people wrote software to automate the process.
Perhaps the master of the form is Tatsuo Horiuchi. He started making Excel art when he retired at age 60 and is now 78 and going strong. Far beyond just colouring in spreadsheet cells, he creates elaborate images using Excel’s drawing functions that were designed to make graphs. You could call it painting by numbers but of a very different kind.
design | tech | words
If Tufte Webbed
Edward Tufte is known as a guru of informational graphic design with a series of bestselling books such as “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”.
[Spread from Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”.]
I sometimes feel that his reputation is a bit overblown and his celebrity shapes the field in ways that probably reduce the diversity of visual approaches to infographics. However, the layout and typography of his books are beautiful. Maybe not as beautiful as Robert Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style” but still quite elegant. (You do see the immediate similarities though.)
[Spread from Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”.]
If you want to replicate the look and feel of Tufte’s books in your browser, you can style your pages using Tufte CSS.
Tufte CSS provides tools to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its simplicity, extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and carefully chosen typography.
The style acknowledges that the Web is not the printed page and so deals with characteristic aspects of Tufte’s page design like the marginal annotations quite nicely. If there is room in the browser to show the sidenotes, it will. However, if the window is too narrow, then the notes are indicated by an icon that expands on a click to show the note.
Like all design templates, you run the risk of looking derivative (just like this newsletter has no real typographic options), but if you’re going to be derivative, Tufte CSS gives a pretty nice way of doing it.
design | digital culture | creativity
Design & fiction
I’ve been thinking about speculative design a lot lately and in digging around came across this really interesting set of presentations and panel discussion. It includes some iconoclastic people who consistently have interesting ideas.
[“Design & Fiction” presentations and panel discussion about speculative design.]
Many years ago, I saw James Bridle speak at a conference called “Books in Browsers” held at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and was blown away. His presentation talked about a series of his projects, none of which are easily classifiable. One that sticks in mind is how he started to wonder about the people who are used in architectural mockups. These little images of people, he noticed, were used over and over in many designs. So he decided to try to find those people. He ended up in a small American town (he’s British and travelled over for that search) left with no other option than to post flyers on power poles to try to track the people down.
At a break in the conference, I wandered outside to get some fresh air, despite the cold and bad weather and he was standing alone, by a power pole as it happened, smoking a cigarette. I said “Hi” and told him that I had nothing of interest to contribute to how he thinks about things but that I really enjoyed his presentation and it made me think newly. And then I left him in peace. I’m sure he wouldn’t remember, but I do.
I’ll return to the topic of speculative design another time in my journal newsletter.
That’s it for issue #1. I’ll be finding my way through this for a while so let me know what you’re finding interesting!