Express Yourself
written by Macintosh
Express Yourself was born out of a sketch I made in October 2022, it was quite rough and raw and I used it to largely create social media posts, but didn’t really have a compelling way to make it into a generative token. It required human input, it was a reflection of an opinion, a person. I could use AI to create slogans for bot’s but that felt like something else.
Then along comes (fx)params, giving the minter the ability to determine the value of features, rather than (fx)rand picking them based on thresholds I set. I was working on two projects that were on hold waiting for (fx)params, and then at 4 am on Sunday morning – the day before params launched, I had a vision for turning dazzle text into a params project.
I already had the sketch – just let people enter three lines and boom done….. well maybe not, it turned into 4 days of work, 3 params became 44, but it's good to be keen!
Inspiration
I’m an 80’s kid and 90’s formed my identity and that was a time of bold graphics and slogans. I love the simplicity of a few powerful words, I love people speaking up and calling out what’s wrong in the world. Plus it was a time of bold graphic design. It felt democratic, exciting and energetic. Hopeful.
I also was massively influenced by Keith Haring, and more recently love the ‘slogan’ work of Pieter Ceizer.
But let’s rewind slightly as to why?
Params is something new, like, really new, there is nothing like it.
We’ve seen a series of innovations in the minting process, the behemoth QQL has a similar mechanism but does not have any random element, verse has been allowing people to pre-store variants to mint the one they want. These are all shaking up the NFT world and creating value and enhanced experiences for collectors.
It’s also introducing something new – the collector has some control over the output, its up to the artist to decide how much. It could just be selecting a pallet, which would have previously been a blind box game of luck in the minting process. I see this a minimum use case for params and one that may well just become a standard for all projects.
But the more params you provide the more ‘control’ the minter has. This is obviously still in a set of guardrails, and no different from the features options, but now they are picked rather than selected by code.
This now embeds the original minter into the output – no more can they get a disappointing mint – ‘oh I wanted a dense red but got a sparse blue’. With long-form there is a tension between offering variety in the mint and irritating collectors in the crap shoot. This is of course part of the fun.
So now there is a whole new dynamic on secondary sales.
• Is a ticket more valuable than an already minted output?
• Does the minter make a token more valuable?
• Does the artist share revenue?
• Do you hold off and see what’s being minted – and avoid the popular choices – but are those more valuable?
So many unknowns and there will be no clear answers as the work and artist will massively influence all the above.
With Express Yourself, I wanted to fully lean into the collaborative minting process. The core of the work is three lines of text, one of which can be highlighted for emphasis.
This means the minter has to choose that text, it could be a meme, a poem, a cry to action, a slogan, a username – anything the human mind can create in words. But what they choose it makes the work partly their work, no longer mine alone.
They can literally sign the work, so if sold on the original minter will be ingrained in the work as an artist.
I find the possibility of this fascinating, of course, it may not be intriguing and compelling to collectors. So, it's all a big experiment. Hope you enjoy it – I can’t wait to see what people create.
About the params
The params offer two types of customisation:
The style of the background the words sit upon
The words, styling of them and positioning.
Typography is fiddly and P5JS isn’t a powerhouse for laying out text, so I made pretty much every aspect customisable by the minter, the size, position, colour, style, font and ‘effects’
With the background elements – you can basically turn them on and off, and choose colours, giving a minimal of maximal approach to the work.
There are a few that may not be super obvious, so I’ll try to explain what they do.
Fade Curvy Ink - is a modifier on Curvy ink, it ads a gradient effect to the ‘wobbly’ curvy ink, it needs curvy ink to be on to work. (soz I didn’t auto set the other param as I didn’t realise you can set them from code.)
Dazzle Density - lets you choose how many times the elements are rendered, so you can have a few or loads layered – its for all (Straight, Curvy, Curvy Ink/fade, and Disks) I didn’t do one density for each – to save sanity.
Use Transparency – uses the alpha colours defined in most places – creating new textures.
Font Size – Fit means it will fit the text into the width, User means it will use the font sizes below.
Rainbow Trail Per Letter- toggles between each letter trailing a colour vs the trails being multicoloured.
Trail Step – determines the granularity of the trail, allowing you to create patterns form the trail.
Some outputs and bloopers