LAIKA is a new, dynamic type­face, designed and con­structed by Nicolas Kunz and Michael Flückiger. The genius here is that visual ele­ments of the face (such as weight, serif promi­nence, and italic degree) are reframed as para­me­ters, into which can be fed val­ues from any source — either your own key­board, or some­thing more inter­est­ing like weight or dis­tance sen­sors, so the visual typo­graphic form can respond to phys­i­cal fac­tors in an instal­la­tion envi­ron­ment. Try it out!

It’s done! This weekend’s cre­at­ing cod­ing work­shop at GAFFTA went really well, despite Loveparade’s pound­ing rev­elry just out­side. In case you missed it, you can expe­ri­ence all 10.5 hours of cod­ing bliss in under two min­utes — just watch the video below. Also, check out some of the great projects that the stu­dents made.

My sou­venir Gray Area logo pin:

I’m very excited to announce that I will be co-teaching a two-day intro­duc­tion to Processing at the new Gray Area Foundation for the Arts here in San Francisco! The work­shop is the first in a series on cre­ative cod­ing, and coin­cides with Gray Area’s grand open­ing cel­e­bra­tions and ini­tial exhi­bi­tion, fea­tur­ing work by C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback, and Stamen Design.

The Gray Area folks have cre­ated an amaz­ing space down­town, and this work­shop is an excit­ing chance to learn a ton of great new skills, and even meet one of Processing’s co-initiators. (C.E.B. will be mak­ing an appearance.)

The work­shop is sched­uled for Saturday, October 3rd & Sunday, October 4th, 1:00 – 6:00pm both days.

See GAFFTA’s site for the com­plete sched­ule, details, and reg­is­tra­tion.

Questions & Answers is my lat­est project: an exper­i­ment in new, non-linear nar­ra­tive forms, or what I’m call­ing data-as-narrative. But really it’s just a fun way to explore some of the crazy, inter­est­ing stuff peo­ple write online.

I gen­er­ated this image from the genetic code of a California case of H1N1 (posted today by the CDC). I fed the data into my color tools project, and assigned one color for each base found in DNA: ade­nine (A), cyto­sine (C), gua­nine (G) and thymine (T). The col­ors were cho­sen by search­ing ColourLovers for each of those base names and using the top result, i.e. the “best” col­ors for A, C, G, and T, accord­ing to ColourLovers.