Tag Archive for 'SVG'

Beginnings of a glitch typeface

Published on 30/12/2009 in Blog. 4 Comments Tags: a, a is for apple, baskerville, databend, glitch, letters of the alphabet, open, SVG.

I was speaking with Jon earlier about my work and he’s noted that a lot of it has been text based and then asked if I was working towards making a typeface in the same style. I must admit, my recent text based work has mostly been an excuse to use the awesome Kawoszeh typeface, but I feel he’s onto something.

Whilst I’m quite far from a complete typeface I’ve been doing a few experiments:

Believe it or not that is the letter A glitched in the same way (replaced 9 with 15), but under different conditions. The reason for the above experiment is wanting to find the best environment in which to make the typeface. For example, the more nodes you have on a shape the more variance you get. The type of nodes that you have also has a major effect.

I’m also thinking about what typeface to use as a base. Being mostly Brummie I’m drawn towards hacking Open Baskerville although using just Arial Black provided some good results, as can be seen in my short glitch animation

I’ll have something produced next year and, should I finally do some coding, actually have a script to databend for me and make the whole process a bit more random!

Jon Reconstructed

Published on 28/12/2009 in Blog. 0 Comments Tags: animation, brad sucks, build up, Inkscape, jon, reconstruct, scribble boy, script, SVG.

Following on from my previous vector reconstruction I decided to reconstruct a much simpler vector portrait of my friend Jon, this time with music by Brad Sucks

Bull Glitch

Published on 01/12/2009 in Art. 0 Comments Tags: Birmingham, bull, bull ring, city of culture, databend, databending, glitch, SVG.

You may have noticed that in my previous post there was a nice little image of the Bull Ring Bull. I did that! Before I go on, it’s not an image that will be used for Birmingham’s City of Culture bid (though if you really like it monies plz). It’s more an image just to represent the work that we’re doing to collect opinions of Birmingham.

bull glitch

Although not a completely original concept (Andy Warhol anyone?) I have utilised a few newly found techniques to create it. Whilst the results, and indeed databending as a whole looks cool I have yet to use it in any real world situations. Until now that is.

To begin I found an image of the Bull and cut it out of the background. I then took it into Inkscape and used the Trace Bitmap function (Alt + Shift + B) and traced it several times using different settings. I saved svgs that scanned for several different colour values. After saving a copy of the original I basically databent it i.e. replaced some numbers with other numbers using a text editor. I’ve described this process in a lot more detail in this earlier tutorial.

I still did manipulate the image afterwards (a bit of shifting of layers and colour/opacity adjustments), but the overall random effect was achieved this way. Here’s how the others turned out:

And now we wait to see if we actually become City Of Culture

Databending: Where next?

Published on 29/10/2009 in Blog. 2 Comments Tags: Graphics, Image file formats, Scalable Vector Graphics, SVG, vector.

I’ve been exploring databending for awhile now and whilst I quite like it I do wonder where it can go next, or rather, where I can take it next. Whilst I like the chaos and apparent random results achieved in opening up an image file in a hex/text editor and mucking around I feel that more could be done with the result. I feel that the modified image (or sound) should part of a design, not the design itself. With that in mind I’ve been doing an experiment mixing the chaotic but more controlled output of Alchemy and several modified images

Essentially what I have done with the images is applied a clipping path to them using a few of the shapes present in the original image. There of course is then scope for editing the SVG in similar ways.

This is a very similar technique to preparing a .psd with many layers and then modifying it. It has been discussed whether this way of using the resultant image constitutes databentbending, but you could argue that with databending you’re attempting to reproduce and control the output of a glitch or error and so if you’re then able to control it it is no longer an error.

Regardless of classifications I’d really like to see where I can take databending next and how I can incorporate errors into design.