ColRD: Gradient Creator

admin October 22, 2011

Tonight, on ColRD, we released the latest rendition of Palette Creator, along with our newest addition; the Gradient Creator! This new webapp makes it fun and easy to create CSS3 linear gradients ? UPDATE: You can also download the Gradient Creator as a Chrome webapp.

Features:

Drag & Drop GIMP Gradient (.GGR) files into the browser to view them!
Delta Swatch: Shows the colors most similar to the one you’re choosing of the 4096 websmart colors (in CIE-Lab color space).
Keyboard goodness with Color Picker: HSL, RGB, and HEX chooser.
Preview: See your gradient in full-screen mode before you save it.
Flip: Flip your gradient, so: first is last, and last is first.
Intriguing new interface to create gradients! …

Do we need a new gradient editor GUI?

Gradient editors haven’t changed much historically, the same dynamic is used throughout GIMP, Illustrator, Inkscape and Photoshop. For me, these interfaces are clunky, leading to repetitive stress of the wrists and fingers, which prompted me to think, “There must be a better way!”. One of the most click-saving changes was combining the Color Picker and Gradient Creator as one unit—there are no popup windows or “Ok” buttons.

Traditionally gradient editors allow users to place a point in space that radiates it’s color in both directions evenly. This is the way that computers think about gradients; color points in space, blended (in the case of <canvas>) linearly.

Description of the Gradient Creator;

ColRD gradient creator presents itself as color blocks—just like a palette.

Inside each color block you will find the midpoint controller—these controllers allow you to stretch the color towards the left or the right of the block.
To the left and right of the color block are col-resize controllers—these allow you to scale the width of the color block and the adjacent one.

Color blocks can be reorganized by dragging and dropping, without rescaling the color block or the ones around it.
If you drag and drop a color block onto the Color Picker, the color will be removed from your gradient (re-absorbed into color space!).

Future developments;

GGR, SVG, and CSS3 exporting (soon, as in this week).
Desktop wallpaper generator; textures, gradients, and user defined sizing (see previous article), along with the Gradient Noise generator.
Time-machine (undo and redo).
The user could split the midpoint, creating a shadow of itself in the opposite direction, this way the user could control the color blur on one edge (as it is now), or both edges simultaneously. The shadow could be fixed to the inverse of the controller (SHIFT-KEY) to create even blurs, or controlled on it’s own independently.

If you have any ideas for the future, let us know!

Random thought;

For those interested in exotic gradient editors, SpectraG is a project that uses mathematic equations to generate gradients;

http://sourceforge.net/projects/spectrag/

HACKED BY SudoX — HACK A NICE DAY.

Apps, ColRD Color, Gradient Picker, HTML5

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):

Code Art Canvas, HTML5

Sketchpad 3.7

admin February 3, 2015

Sketchpad v3.7 has arrived!

Here’s a list of new features:

High-Res export for print! 300DPI
Autosaving to library!
Document resizing.
Path smoothing on Pencil tool—no more shaky lines!
Path tool – curved path editor.
Polyline tool – straight line editor.
Arrow brush with curved path (or straight path)
More background styles! Colors, gradients and patterns, oh my.
Outline style on Shapes, Text, and various supported Brushes.
Angle control on Linear Gradient style.
Color Noise on Linear & Radial Gradients
Designed for Mobile/Desktop hybrid experience.
Improved speed of undoing multiple actions.
Text-box resizing without scaling by holding ShiftKey.

Play around with the latest version to see for yourself ?

Apps HTML5, Sketchpad

Made with Code

admin June 23, 2014

I recently had the pleasure of working on Google’s Made with Code initiative with the Red & Co. creative studio and Mash a group of developers located in Portland Oregon.

My primary focuses were creating the renderer for the Bracelet Challenge along with the binary exporter that takes peoples rendered bracelets and sends them to Shapeways for 3D printing. I have to say this job was probably the most satisfying work that’s come my way! For three reasons: (1) The initiative of inspiring a more diverse range of people interested in programming at an early age is awesome (2) Red & Co and Mash were friendly, fun and altogether great team to work with (3) The work was challenging and allowed me time to work with more cutting edge technologies ?

The Bracelet renderer was developed with ThreeJS. My modest contribution back to the ThreeJS project can be found here: STLBinaryExporter

The letters were generated by Red & Co. and exported into STLs. Since STLs are huge uncompressed representations of 3D objects (made up of tons of triangles) the files from there were converted into CTMs using OpenCTM‘s ctmconv—this shaved 10’s of megabytes of the combined file-size of the entire alphabet. The letters were then mapped to a spiral like lego bricks as conceived by Ryan Reece of Mash. Here’s a screenshot of what that looked like:

The app also needed to run in Java (on Google’s AppEngine) so the server could render the bracelets the users created. Although the app could very well send the STL files directly to Shapeways, we needed to control what was being sent so there was no unfortunate surprises! By rendering on the backend we could be sure what was being sent to Shapeways. Instead of re-writing the code from scratch I decided to keep as much as possible in Javascript. I first got the scripts running in Rhino but it was too slow. I ran across the project Jav8 and was quite happy with the results performing around 10x faster than Rhino. I ended up writing some of the matrix math in Java and exposing the function to Javascript to speed things up further.

From there, the bracelets are sent to Shapeways where they are printed with high-quality nylon plastic on 3D printers from EOS, a German printer manufacturer who provided P760 SLS 3D printers to support the initiative.

The Bracelet challenge has a limited print run, so get them while you can! After that there will still be a lot of other fun challenges on the Made with Code website.

Here’s a video from Shapeways:

Apps HTML5, WebGL