This was supposed to be a post about how I implemented Elian script in Logo, but ultimately it would’ve been a fairly technical slog through all the trial and error I went through trying to account for as many of the different orientations of each character as possible, and I didn’t feel like it was worth it because I didn’t actually end up doing anything with it. Like, it works, and I like how it looks, but the only idea I had for how to turn it into something actually artistic was to use it as sort of a frame for an image, which I did implement a version of but then I didn’t know what to actually draw inside the frame, and then messed around with trying to draw with the mouse, and eventually my interest just kind of petered out and I didn’t touch Logo for about 8 months.
Then last night I was struck by inspiration and an hour later I’d saved 36 images.
The original idea was a canvas filled by vertical bars, with each bar split in two at a random point and each section a different color. For a while I just messed around with the spacing and width of the bars.
Next I played around with randomizing the directions of the bars to create what starts out as a sort of “pile of pickup sticks” look and then, as the width of the bars increases, looks more like a close-up of recycled paper or laminated confetti.
Finally, I tried a square spiral method that introduced all sorts of interesting errors while I was figuring it out.
Most of the variation in the pattern comes down to how I was setting the length of the bars (I eventually figured out if I didn’t want those (very cool) artifacts toward the middle I needed to only adjust the length every other side) and how many times I had it draw (those sort of inverted images come from going past the point where the center is filled in, so it works it’s way back out; the ones with the spiral in the center and at the corners are from having it go only halfway past that point.)
I had some ideas for messing with how it sets the color of each, like adjusting it to be relative to where it is in the spiral, but by that point I was getting sleepy and my computer was getting hot. I did remember to save the code, so I might come back to it at some point. At least it’s nice to know I still enjoy doing Logo stuff.
Certain of Eventual Failure 