A Simple Fail

24 Apr 202320 EDITIONS

1 TEZ

Background

Upon completion of my first project, Adherence, I had the full intention to take a step back and release a "simple" project for my follow-up. I fully believe that simple projects can be just as striking and beautiful as more complex projects. Adherence, while successful, had gotten away from me as I struggled to cram in all of the neat ideas that would continually pop into my mind.

I started by looking for simple inspirations. I took note of several ideas over the next few weeks. One evening, while out to dinner with my family at a local sushi restaurant, I found inspiration in the design they had etched into their windows. It doesn't get much more simple than this; I'm sure you've seen this design several times today! Depending on how you look at the tiling design, you may see stars, triangles, or cubes.

To be honest, I wasn't so sure this would be the foundation of my next project, but I thought it would be fun to see how I would go about coding the recreation of the design. I decided to create a simple grid and calculate the algorithm for determining which points of the grid should be connected to match the pattern. I would then let randomization take part as parameters in the algorithm to mix things up in interesting ways. This worked very well and is still roughly how A Simple Fail is generated.

The Failure

While the foundations are all very basic, I once again failed completely at keeping it simple. I worked on multiple techniques for filling the tile faces. I struggled with different ways to introduce controlled chaos into the project. I developed brand new (for me) methods for drawing imperfect lines, circles, and hatchings. I introduced multiple ways of playing with color throughout the faces of the tiles. With each new element, I did so as if I were just playing around on the P5 Playground. The result was a very unruly code-base which eventually caused me a significant amount of pain. You may be familiar with the programming principle called DRY which stands for Don't Repeat Yourself. Well, I repeated myself.....a lot! Instead of stopping to clean things up, I could only find motivation to immediately improve my outputs. In general, I piled bad code on top of bad code.

What was supposed to be a simple project that I would be able to release in a couple of months at most ended up taking me nearly three quarters of a year to reach the standards of a project that I would be excited to mint as a collector. While the development of this project was a failure in at least one key way, failure isn't all bad. I am thoroughly excited about the quality of the outputs and I hope you will receive the same enjoyment from such A Simple Fail.

Core Project Features

Draw Styles: Human and Computer

I enjoy generative artwork that incorporates elements of both human and digital artistry. A Simple Fail does so by using both "perfect" and simulated human drawing styles.

A test output drawn in a perfect, digital style

The same output drawn in the style of a human armature

Tile Style: More Imperfections

I found it enjoyable to find different way of disrupting the tiling pattern to varying degrees.

Aspect Ratios

My first project, Adherence, had a single 1:1, square aspect ratio. A Simple Fail incorporates multiple aspect ratios as a feature. Additionally, any output can be altered to adapt to the screen size of whatever device you are viewing on with a press of the "A" key. Press "A" a second time to rotate the adaptive output 90 degrees. This is in case you are on a device that you would prefer to see the output rotated. Press "A" again to return to the original aspect ratio.

You can accomplish the same thing via the use of a url parameter:

?params=1 will return the adaptive output

?params=2 will return the rotated adaptive output

This articles title sample rendered to adapt to the size of my ultra-wide monitor

Inspirations

I thought it would be fun to share a list of projects that have, in one way or another, been an inspiration for me and A Simple Fail. Some of these inspirations will be very well known, but I hope that this call out will at least introduce a few new eyes to projects that they haven't seen before!

(All of these pieces showcased are own by me!)