Galactic.ink | Code & Design

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Sketchpad 5.0

admin January 9, 2018

Hot off the press! Introducing Sketchpad v5.0 (codename Fancy Fox)

Sketchpad’s exciting new features:

Thousands of new Clipart provided by OpenClipart!
Hundreds of new Fonts provided by Google Fonts!
Entirely new Sketchpad User Guide developed by Ryan Reece!
Paint into layers: You can now use any brush to draw into any Shape or Image layer!
Mirror Brush: A crowd favorite! The mirror brush, as it’s name suggests, allows you to easily draw symmetrical imagery, similar to a mandala. For example the image above was created with this brush! We find this tool to be especially effective art therapy.
Tile Brush: Perhaps the most versatile brush, the Tile Brush, allows you to stretch an image across any path that you draw. This can be a lot of fun! If you want, you can even drag an image from your Desktop onto the Stroke, and stretch that image along the path you draw. Experiment for joys abound.
Align layers: When using the Select tool you can now align layers in respect to other layers. The new methods supported are: top, left, right, bottom, horizontal, vertical
Distribute layers: When using the Select tool you can now distribute layers in respect to other layers. The new methods supported are: horizontal, vertical

We hope you enjoy Sketchpad v5.0!

As always feel free to drop us a message and let us know what you think 🙂

Apps

Sketchpad 4.1

admin January 4, 2017

Extra extra! There’s a new SketchPad in town! Here’s a rundown of the latest features:

Choose a theme, or create your own! ? My current favorite is Deep Purple!
12 languages professionally translated, complete with LTR/RTL support:
Realtime preview of tools while editing settings!
High-Res export is now more reliable with all tools.
SVG export has been added.
Heart shape added.
A few spunky new clipart have been added, not much, but super cute, more soon!
The interface has been smoothed out, to be more a structured, uniform, and visual user experience.
Vector Fill has greatly improved support for Clipart.
Bitmap Fill (previously Floodfill) is back! The latest version creates a vectorized cache of the floodfill region making future renders much speedier.
Much speedier scrolling of Layers/History panes thanks to Clusterize.js

Hope you enjoy! Btw, If you work with a school or non-profit education center contact me about getting a free license to use SketchPad with your students.

Apps

Sketchpad 4.0

admin June 17, 2016

I’m excited to announce Sketchpad 4.0! The focuses on this release has making the app more colorful, faster, and easier to use.

Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Stroke/Fill is available on all brushes.
VectorFill replaces Floodfill for crisper edges and much faster rendering! This can lead to some fun by importing an SVG into Sketchpad, re-coloring it, and download it back as an SVG (right click to download!).
Linear gradient editor
Radial gradient editor
Text updates with special thanks to OpenType.js & some inspiration from FitText! Editing text now feels very smooth. Additionally these new features are available:
1. Font Size is automatically set based on textarea dimensions
2. Bold, Italic, Underline & Stroke styles
3. Align Left, Center, Right & Justify
4. Line Height & Letter Spacing
Crop has been merged with the Resize tool making life simpler. What’s better the crop tool now automatically zooms your viewport to fit so you can see your entire document while cropping.
Your library view has been updated with a more robust & spacious interface, along with more obvious buttons for renaming, duplicating, and removing documents.
High-res export now works on all tool and style combinations!
New auto-save UI allows you to disable the ‘auto-saving’ feature. This is helpful especially on large documents with thousands of layers that may take awhile to autosave. Although, to that end, auto-saving is much faster in the new version.
And finally you’ll find an export button right on the toolbar for all those who requested it!
Special thanks to jsondiffpatch which is now used in Sketchpad’s history.

There are a couple things that could not be 100% converted to the new version Sketchpad. You may want to consider whether these matter to you before upgrading your files (you will be prompted). My apologies for any inconvenience these may cause you:

FloodFill was depreciated. It just did not make sense to keep in. It cost too much to maintain, it was notorious for crashing users browsers. Sketchpad is a vector app, so a bitmap FloodFill never made sense. The new VectorFill replaces the FloodFill, and the results are much nicer!
LinearGradient format needed to be upgraded in order support the new Gradient Editor, in doing so LinearGradients may shift slightly.

If for any reason you’d like to use the older version of Sketchpad you can find it at its new permanent URL: https://sketch.io/sketchpad-3.7.6/

Or better yet, check out the latest!

https://sketch.io/sketchpad/

C.A.R.D.S. Project

admin October 19, 2015

I was recently asked to create artwork for the C.A.R.D.S. Project. Chris & John gave me no restrictions, and only one task: Create something interesting that fits on a 3.5 x 2.0 business card. For me, this was a dream project and an exciting excuse to play around with some generative algorithms!

My goal was to create an ‘ocean scene’. To do this I used Perlin noise vector fields, bezier curves, and color cycling. The ‘creatures’ or ‘waves’ are grown based on randomized parameters such as ‘width’, ‘length’ and ‘color’. The parameters change over time; some linearly, while others are mapped to cosine/sine waves and easing functions (this resulted in a more organic feeling).

I ended up submitting 250 unique cards to the project. Each card is composed of 10-frames and took 1-2 minutes to generate. Many were thrown out in the process! From there the cards were sent to GifPop for lenticular printing.

Here’s a few of my favorites (the squid in the first image is by Justin Windle):