Interactive Type 4.3

For this part of the design brief, I was inspired by building blocks that little children play with, the blocks with letters on the surface, as well as “fridge” magnets that allow you to leave messages for others. The overall notions of this deign brief comes from those two sources of inspiration.

This Interactive project was created in Processing.

The basis is simple; visually the project is separated in two parts, the letters at the bottom of the stage A-Z, and the stage where the letters are placed.

The user can pick up the letters on the row beneath the stage by simply click on the letter then dragging it to the stage and dropping it,, there are numerous copies of each letter, so when the user selects a letter “A” for example he can select as many times as needed.

With the simple press of the SPACE BAR, the stage is cleared, allowing for a whole new creation.

When the user selects a letter, a red border surrounds the object so that, it is evident that is the letter that is being chosen at the time.

These are a few screen captures illustrating the work.

“Topics in Kinetic Imagery” is spelled out using the letters below, the letters can be placed anywhere, as long as it is within the white space of the stage.

Image two demonstrated the letters being placed on the stage with the letter “O” being the one currently being interacted with because of the red border illustrating its selection. In the code behind the image you can clearly see the program acknowledging that certain letters have been selected.

“Picked k”

“Picked t”

“Picked o”

Image 3 and 4 are images of the actual code that was created in processing to generate the project.

You can see that the coding in image 3 sets the properties for constructing the letters within the box, the cells size, and font type.

Image 4 goes into detail, the construction for the boxes, determines the class, letter size, font color, type, stroke, alpha…

This project is an example of simple interactive enjoyment, using text.

The last image does not pertain to the work for db 4.3, but is an example of processing abilities to create kinetic type. The type itself is 8 lines with the subject matter describing the class. The lines of text sway back and forth l or up and down, creating a wave effect, I thought it was a good example of processing’s abilities to create kinetic type.