GDP-DA

DIA Studio

DIA
Studio

Mitch Paone

Interviewed by

Demian Conrad
and
Rob van Leijsen

<Mitch Paone>5 is a co-founder of DIA Studio, which specializes in corporate and cultural visual identity systems, graphic design, and typography. DIA’s signature use of motion and generative tools has led to major collaborations with Apple, Balenciaga, A-Trak, Nike, Saint Laurent, Squarespace, among many others. In addition to his work with DIA, Paone is a performing jazz pianist, composer and type designer. Paone also lectures and leads workshops at conferences and universities worldwide, most notably, at the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague (KABK), Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL), the Pratt Institute, and the School for Visual Arts. Recently Paone has accepted a permanent professorship at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva (HEAD-Genève) in the Media Design Master and Visual Communication Bachelor programs. There, he will be implementing DIA’s creative process into the academic curriculum, with a specific focus on motion and generative tools in a graphic design context. Paone and his DIA studio partner Meg Donohoe were recently inducted into the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).

<GG>5 Who is
<DIA Studio>
?

The DIA Studio Team is a team of design professionals with decades of experience creating and marketing creative for organizations and corporations. We deliver design, development and testing solutions designed for all stages of a project’s development cycle. Our expertise lies in the area of digital transformation. Here we assist clients in designing and developing their digital presence, focusing on their customer experience, their brand, and their web apps. We work in the broad context of user experience and usability. Whether we are designing for new or existing programs or creating a new product or brand experience, we strive to make the experience of using our creations as pleasant as possible. DIA Studio is a Chicago, IL-based digital design and development firm servicing North America. We work closely with our client’s product development teams, architects, data miners, product owners, strategists, and design experts to help them achieve their online design, branding, development, and marketing goals. At DIA Studio, we value the importance of both client relationships and our own brand standards… so we only work with agencies with whom we’d like to partner. We value a close, collaborative working relationship that allows us to leverage each other’s strengths and skillsets to produce the greatest return for our clients. We like to think we’re pretty awesome—but we’d be absolutely delighted if we were. If you would like to submit a project for consideration, please fill out a form to get more details including scope, expected timelines, an introductory price quote, and if we’re open to working with you on this kind of project, what our ideal relationship may be. We take our job as a designer very seriously. At DIA Studio, we don’t design by the hour, or use an hourly rate as a performance metric. We pride ourselves on getting to really know our clients, and understand their needs and goals. We’ll only accept projects with the highest quality of workmanship on first contact. In all matters, we’ll be upfront with our clients regarding fees, deliverables, and project scope. Projects We Worked On Working with DIA Studio Our studio is small, so we’ve only assigned a handful of our projects to a project manager. We keep projects light by using shared spreadsheets, and as projects are in our beginning stages, we use Google Docs. There will likely be a few points where the project may not go as planned, so we ensure our clients have their say. We’ll also work with you as we progress along the way, but we’ll give you the final decision for scope, deliverables, and pricing as the project progresses.

D.C.Mitch, first of all, thank you for participating in our project, we are delighted to have you. Could you introduce us to the topic of creative coding? For example, tell us about a project you did for a client where you used creative coding. How did you develop it and how did creative coding impact your creative process?

M.P.All right, so to introduce myself, I’m Mitch Paone, Creative Director and Cofounder of DIA Studio. We are a Slack-enabled graphic design studio located in Geneva [Switzerland], New York City… one of our staff is in Germany, we’re all over the place. We specialize in corporate identity for the most part, with a lot of motion graphics and more production-oriented stuff as well. My partner Meg [Donohoe] is the Managing Director; she primarily handles the business functions of the studio, but also runs creative direction on projects. And then there’s Daniel Wenzel, who is a designer and a creative coder as well. We also have Deanna Sperrazza as a graphic designer: she’s holding down the New York office at the moment. They have all been part of the team for some time.

M.P.So, to answer more specifically about our projects, there are a lot of cases in which we’ve used coding to help us enable a lot of things, but in different capacities. Sometimes creative coding is a very expressive part of the work, or it can be very functional. I’ll talk about a few different paths we take. There are two projects, for example, both for Squarespace. One was a brand identity project we did for them: custom typeface, the whole visual system. Then there was also an exhibition piece that we did for this thing in London called Secret 7″. That was a bit more of an experimental project where we used creative coding. I’ll start with that one, because chronologically, that was the first project we did.

M.P.Secret 7″ is a music/art event which takes place in London, and they asked Squarespace to sponsor the event. As part of the sponsorship, they helped fund it. We decided that this project would provide a great opportunity to create some very interesting artistic tools. We ended up creating a tool, based on seven different pieces of music, that typographically visualized each track in a certain way. Ultimately, the final product was actually a design application that any member of the public could use to create very expressive typographic posters and animations, one which receives input text, generates effects through it, and prints out this stuff at high resolution. In this case, the tool or the code was the final product of the piece. That was quite interesting for us, because we were able to create a prototype and develop it over a period of time. In the end, you just give it to other people for them to use, to enable them to create designs very easily. The end user didn’t need to have any background in design, the tool itself maintained all these principles of design that we set up and then placed them at the disposal of someone else for their use.

M.P.Initially, we did a lot of research on our end in terms of creative and art direction, asking questions like “Which effects made sense with each music track?” We were trying to convey that visually, in the same way the designer of a record cover creates a piece of artwork. We had to do that times seven, only using typography, in black and white, with limitations. Each one had a very different style, a different effect, a different approach, all conveyed just through the use of text.

PDGD-ITW-MitchPaone, Image 2
Secret 7{\textquotedbl}. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.

M.P.How were we able to make that stuff? We prototyped everything in 3D with Cinema4D or After Effects , and created looping animations to show the way we wanted the text to animate. Once we had some sign-off for these directions, we began working with Zach Lieberman to bring these elements into a coded environment.

PDGD-ITW-MitchPaone, Image 2
Visitors creating posters at Secret 7{\textquotedbl}. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.

M.P.All of a sudden, what we had could become interactive and expressive, with more range and modules and tools. You could change camera angles, you could scale it, you could instance the text, you could do a lot more stuff based on the prototypes that we built. Finally, there was a third wave to this, because Squarespace makes websites for people, so they were like “We need to make sure this is a web-based application,” because that would be in line with the company’s needs.

M.P.Using Zach’s openFrameworks we then worked with the in-house team at Squarespace. They have a huge team of developers to convert it all into Java Script. Then we made a web app that was publicly available. Unfortunately, the link isn’t up anymore.

M.P.It was a well-funded experimental project that really changed the studio and how we approach some stuff, and we’re seeing this becoming increasingly common.

PDGD-ITW-MitchPaone, Image 2
Secret 7{\textquotedbl}, Design Application. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.

M.P.In tandem, we worked on the rebrand for Squarespace. It was a pretty traditional rebrand, but what was uniquely interesting about this project was the behavior of this animation: we played with the idea of a square and space as some sort of visual trick that became the identifying element of how the work was actually displayed visually. So you perceive this sense of dimension using this square in space through both animated and still formats.

M.P.In a way, the motion and the actual behavior that we developed in motion was the way we generated the entire work. In this case, we were using After Effects to do 90% of the design tasks. It became problematic at a certain point that we couldn’t necessarily convert this into coded stuff, or generate huge-scale prints with After Effects . You simply just couldn’t do that.

M.P.So what we needed to do was to take the same behaviors we were using for animation and convert them into an interactive environment for the in-house team to use. We set up a whole range of different toolkits and toolsets, where if you just enter data, put images in, and then text, and you deal with some sliders, it generates different possibilities of layouts, especially for larger print stuff.

PDGD-ITW-MitchPaone, Image 2
Squarespace Identity. DIA Studio and Zach Lieberman, 2018.

M.P.What was so paramount about a tool like this—and I think in this process—is that the brand did not have fixed formats for communication. So we could go square, rectangle, tall, wide, and everything in-between. The only way to generate consistency of composition rules was that it needed to be coded into something and not have to be interpreted by a brand designer every time.

M.P.Furthermore, since the in-house brand teams were not super proficient in, say Cinema 4D or After Effects to do this work, this made it very easy for them to take over these assets to create stuff based on these tools. They didn’t have to really think about the technical side. They could just play around with it, find the composition that worked for them, and then export it.

M.P.I feel pretty strongly that this is how things will be happening more and more frequently. I think as a studio, we are not actually interested in making PDF documents and brand guidelines. It is way more interesting to create a series of tools that you hand over to these companies so they can take over the execution of the work internally.

M.P.I believe this is the future for several reasons: one, you are guaranteeing consistency because you have input a lot of limitations there; but also you actually empower the in-house teams because the tools become less prescriptive for the end user or rather the end creator to use. They can use the scales, play with the buttons, generate this output, and have a lot of fun making this stuff. However, you are also guaranteeing some brand consistency and visual consistency within the system work. The Secret 7″ job with Squarespace was a really great expressive experience, but then what we did regarding the brand was extremely functional. I don’t think we would be able to do a lot of this stuff without the possibility of using Java Script and the other creative coding tools.

M.P.Then, to top it off, they are a massive brand who essentially took a big risk on a new way of thinking. For us, it proves, especially in the context of American corporate identity work, that this is the way things are going to go, but also I think it changed our perspective and it’s how we want to work moving forward.

R.v.L.So, would you say that the approach for the brand design appropriated the philosophy of the company itself and it was really more like a merging synergy?

M.P.I just kicked off a project. We’re doing a branding project for somebody else and the whole thing amounts to the creation of a tool, that’s it. We give them a tool for them to make the stuff, and they’re going to have all the license to play with that within the guidelines of a strict sort of art direction that we develop. I also had a good discussion with Meg about this. From a business perspective, for a design studio, it’s a really interesting thing, because if you think about type foundries licensing fonts, if you create elements subject to intellectual property on products for specific companies, there is the possibility of this becoming quite lucrative for designers and design studios. This way, you’re not just dealing with the initial budget, it’s more like, “Hey, you own this for maybe two years. You can license this sort of thing from us for this period of time, but after that, it’s fair game for us to use on anything.” So you’re thinking about this more the way you would for music licensing or font licensing, as an approach for a business structure, versus a project-to-project fee. This could be really, really interesting as well as a really intelligent way to approach a design problem.

M.P.We did a bunch of R&D on tools for in-app effects for Instagram, and that was the same thing. They bought licenses for these Java Script things that we sent to them. So they were bank-buying IP, basically, outright or in perpetuity, versus just giving us a budget. So I thought, “This is a new way, a totally new way of working!” I don’t want to be dealing with project to project work for the next twenty years of my life, because that’s just not sustainable for me. Who knows what’s going to happen in twenty years? I take the position that you’ve got to jump on the train, otherwise you’re going to be gone. You’re going to be in the dust if you don’t. You don’t have to learn how to make it, you’ve got to learn how to work with it and work with people to create things. You don’t necessarily have to learn code, but you have to understand the process.

D.C.You’re envisioning a new way of working in which a designer shifts from being a craftsperson to becoming a designer of systems. So can you develop this idea of a system designer a little bit more?

M.P.I really do think hardcore typesetting and that sort of stuff will be automated within the next ten years. Good rags, good leading. You’ll just look at the page, figure out the dimensions, boom, you’re going to get the right typeface size, no variable fonts, who knows. It’s going to be able to give you the exact, perfect thing. We won’t have to think about this anymore, which is good, I think. Maybe people will get really upset with me for saying that, but I do think it’s a good thing, because that way we can set our minds to thinking about the concept of the work, maybe pushing the work further, and automating these things that we would have wasted hours on doing, fundamentally making it much quicker. I had a lot of experience with that, especially with the A-Trak job. A lot of the covers were done based on exports from tools that were made. Basically, I could generate effects or practice some very interesting layout techniques that we could not do by hand. Then we would just pick the one we liked best and that went to print. So the process, the design was not crafted, it was curated from something else.

M.P.All of a sudden, the speed of the work was increased—that record cover took a millisecond to make. You get uncomfortable because you are ingrained with the idea that we should have nursed this thing for like four months before it can be good. I like to say that time doesn’t ever equal quality. Quality is your whole experience coming in all at once to decide which is the right direction. Time spent on it is bullshit. It’s like when people say, “I worked on this font for ten years.” It doesn’t mean it’s good. It might be well crafted, but the esthetic could be off, so it doesn’t mean anything. Consequently, when thinking about system designs more specifically, or systematic design, I have always seen brand guidelines as essentially a formula. When I work with students and we talk about composition, it’s the limitations you put on it that makes it feel the way it does. If you can use only Helvetica 18-point type, and then the rest is open, the fact that you have just the consistency of the font chosen, the size, means that there will be a relative consistency in everything, because those limitations are always there. That’s just from an esthetic point of view. When you start thinking about branding, you have a wide range of elements with different outputs or whatever it’s going to be on the format. Ultimately, you are baking in all these very strict parameters for the work to maintain a consistent esthetic.

M.P.That’s something I’m very interested in, because I feel that if you can look at brand guidelines as if there is some sort of scientific formula, that always exports this specific energy or attitude and a composition, it could be coded. A brand book could be coded. You could have a variety of tools that generate everything that comes out of that. It’s no different than a website—I mean that’s what websites are. That’s why Squarespace is interesting, because they’re making websites where you can just input information in the back and it comes out. I think people don’t realize that’s why I think websites are actually so interesting, because it is this fluid, responsive environment that generates consistent typographic rules. I think we take them for granted.

M.P.Creative coding can help the imagery if you do one-off things, but I think the large potential lies in the systematic side because if you think about design as a system, then you should be able to program a majority of the stuff to do what you need it to do, if not actually enable you to do a lot more interesting stuff. I think that code is a bit challenging because there’s no easy entry into it, and also, since you can do anything, that’s a problem. It gets impossible when you think “I can do everything.”

M.P.What’s good about things like Cinema 4D or After Effects or visual effects software, is that there are a lot of generative possibilities implicit in how they work. You have input/output modules already working for you. You can load a font and you can change it really quickly. All this stuff, if you have to code, is a lot of extra work, but if you can use this software, and then figure out what you want to do, and then have prototyped it there, then you know exactly what you need to code, because you built this thing.

D.C.How will technology, or these new design tools, affect a broader audience in the future?

M.P.I think it kind of stems from how design education is going to work. Until it becomes generalized, if these things aren’t discussed within the classroom, especially in entry-level, or bachelor-level design education, then it isn’t going to have that much of an effect on the work. We have adopted a process in the studio that isn’t just a kind of theoretical discussion about stuff. We just make things. We know we have an objective and a goal. We just go out there and we make as much as possible.

M.P.Everybody in the team just turns out as much as possible, and that way we separate ourselves from the final product. In a way, we’ve actually become machines, working the way that software would operate. I’m going to iterate A, B, C, D, all the way through version 1000, and then we’ll put it all on the wall and then curate the final product of whatever we’re working on. I think the output has changed because of that. I think there has been some esthetic quality applied to it.

M.P.Finally, these processes can be followed with any bit of content, just like coding. If you put illustration in there, photography or other sorts of things, not just text, you’ll get a wildly different range of esthetic outputs.

M.P.That’s also something I teach in my class in the bachelor’s program: I have students who are illustrators, and what they’ve created with the process has been radically different than what I would do, because they’re taking what they like and merging it in there. That’s one of the most important things, and why it’s really important to bring all this into an academic environment.

M.P.This is an interesting moment within the field of design, and in general. I think that, because tech is moving so fast and our communication formats are changing, we need to think about how our field works within those contexts. Consequently, this becomes part of the toolkit of a designer, you have to learn how to work in this format. You’re no longer just learning how to do posters. It’s going to be a really relevant exercise in the classroom, maybe in the first year, to gain an understanding of basic principles of design. I think that it’s essential to bring this stuff in further along in the curriculum.

R.v.L.To get back to the designer-client relationship, when you hand over the tools you designed, are you curating them afterwards? Do you supervise their use?

M.P.It depends. The Squarespace thing was so tight that we could just let them do it. If you’re developing the tool, you should actually be happy to set it free. It should be important for us to know that our babies have left the nest and then to allow them to be free. That’s not only just from a design standpoint; if you have created a good enough tool, then it should just work. There will be times where something breaks or a bug comes up and needs to get fixed, but I think before it gets handed over, we were pretty happy with the result. What’s actually more interesting in this case, is that you’re going to be surprised by what you see. You actually see more interesting stuff generated because you have different people working with these tools. Sometimes it actually ends up being better, or more interesting. Or sometimes it goes to shit, but we don’t have control over that. What I realize is that if you take a lot of basic typographic stuff out of the team’s hands, the things that would fall apart and really ruin the thing are actually being taken away. Then you should allow people to have more fun with how things are being animated or composed, and maybe let elements get more expressive.

M.P.It’s important for the tool to have enough flexibility, and not be annoying or cumbersome for the end user, or make them feel like they’re just inputting data. I think there needs to be some enabled freedom in there in order to make it fun and interesting to use and provide a lot of variety and options. The Squarespace Secret 7″ project was very interesting because you had people that weren’t even designers using it, and they were making really interesting stuff. The possibilities were quite limitless. There was no identical export, everything was individual and unique, and yet you could tell it was part of the same system. Actually that is something I really like, this tension between something strict and yet extremely expressive.

R.v.L.Are the credits for the creation shared between designer, tool and executor?

M.P.This is actually a really delicate issue. We ran into this recently because we just did a brand identity for the Adidas flagship stores. We created the visual identity, and all of the assets for the system. Another company was tasked to convert that into code, and develop different systems because the formats were so cumbersome.

M.P.So there is the sensibility of this middle-person that acts as a production artist or engineer, in a way. They aren’t necessarily the art director or the creative director of the project. The funny thing about this is, this company is trying to submit this to award shows and stuff, and we’re like, “well, I mean, yeah, you guys had a part in this, but you had nothing to do with the feel and the esthetic of the pieces.” So therefore if you submit this, and win some design award, you won it based on our work, essentially, even though they did do a ton of work. So it’s like this strange push and pull, and that’s a very unusual relationship. Production companies, in essence, are generally engineers with some design sensibility. They are designers, but they need the creative direction to pull it off. I’m always a bit conflicted regarding this area of owning and freedom. I like to be in the background, but sometimes, if someone tries to take credit for something we did, then I will be a shark about it.

D.C.What is your opinion about artificial intelligence? Do you think it will be used for graphic design?

M.P.For me, automation and AI have become part of the toolkit that we already have. They’re already kind of baked into some of these softwares, but we just need to be open-minded about it and test it out, and try and work with people that know how to work with it.

R.v.L.Do you see any of the tools you developed for clients becoming, at some point, open-source software?

M.P.If we start making tools and then clients are buying licenses for them, you become a software developer, too. We are getting hired to do this stuff. From a business standpoint, I would probably assert licenses. However, I think it’s important, at least for my studio, to think about this as intellectual property. There is a price attached to that work.

M.P.We used to be pretty open about what we were doing internally and we’ve actually become quite secretive now. We realized that, not only the tool, but this development of some sort of esthetic comes out of something that you are working on, and then you put it out in the world, and that becomes fair game as a reference with which designers can move forward. So for us, it won’t go out into the world unless it hits on a big project, otherwise it’s hidden, and the only time we share that is for a new project. There is all this research that we have access to in the studio, and a lot of things here that we can develop and move forward within this new project. If that goes through the finish line, then boom. After that, I’m less concerned about commoditization.

M.P.Still, what happened before and what was a bit frustrating for me when we were being more transparent, is that we literally jump-started the careers of other designers doing a lot of the same work. They basically got their start by figuring out what we were doing and then doing the exact same thing, so you could say we have copycats.

R.v.L.I think it’s the same credit discussion, but with your colleagues instead of your collaborators.

M.P.I think actually that’s one of the biggest reasons why I’m dedicating a lot more time to teaching, because I was at the forefront of a lot of the stuff, things that we’ve learned through the work process and thinking about tools and design. For this to have any impact in the field, in a wider spectrum, it needs to be brought into the academic environment.

D.C.Is there, in your opinion, a movement that we can attach to the idea of creative coding?

M.P.I think it’s very disconnected, and I think it goes back to methods of design education. The biggest hurdle right now is that the people that are part of the design establishment, from an academic standpoint, don’t know how this works. So if you have people running programs across Switzerland, the United States, that don’t even understand the basics of animation, you have to think about how we are going to jumpstart this at a higher level. There’s no way, because the curriculum has to spring from a working understanding of these concepts. That’s why this is going to take some time. Luckily, you have people like Zach Lieberman in the US focusing on it. However, the issue with that is that it’s not graphic design—it isn’t. It’s media art and there’s a big delineation between media art and graphic design. The way this is going to have to happen, is that these media interaction departments need to merge with the graphic design departments. I think it’s absurd that they’re still separate. They’re closely linked in the US. Interaction design and graphic design are much more interrelated in the US, but the problem in the US is that we have a design education system that is oriented towards marketing, so we’re not teaching designers to think systematically.

M.P.As time goes on and these lines start to blur more, and this begins to infiltrate into the academic environment, then it won’t just be a movement. I would go as far as to say that it is the way design is going to be in the very near future, maybe even just five years from now. There’s going to be this fluidity between technology and design. Design has to catch up with the formats and the technology, and they have to be taught together. You need to mix your media interaction design classes with your graphic design classes. There is no other way: in my opinion, they should not be separated. They are not separate paths.

R.v.L.I have one last question. What would be your definition of creative coding?

M.P.I think of creative coding as more like a simplification of repetitive tasks, in a way. Essentially, it just allows you to be far more creative because it’s simplifying things that you don’t necessarily want to have to deal with, enabling new potentials in some sort of esthetic output that was simply just not possible with the tools and means we had before.

M.P.It doesn’t need to be code as a matter of course, but I think the key is thinking about how code works, thinking how an engineer works. It opens up a different way of thinking about how work can be produced. That is one of the most important things, it’s not necessarily about the need to be a master, but rather of putting yourself in a position of empathy with an engineer and knowing what can actually come of that. It becomes more about using tools to allow you to curate results, rather than sitting around crafting them for two months. I think it’s more of a philosophy than a technological thing, but in the end, it is both.

Glossary

ActionScript

ActionScript was an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe Systems). It is influenced by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. ActionScript was initially designed for controlling simple 2D vector animations made in Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash). Initially focused on animation, early versions of Flash content offered few interactivity features and thus had very limited scripting capability. Later versions added functionality, allowing for the creation of web-based games and rich web applications with streaming media (such as video and audio). Today, ActionScript is suitable for desktop and mobile development through Adobe Air, and can be used in some database applications, as well as in basic robotics, such as the Make Controller Kit.

Adobe

Adobe Inc., originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company. Incorporated in Delaware and head-quartered in San Jose, California, it has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures and print. Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Flagship products include: Photoshop image editing software, Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based illustration software, Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Portable Document Format (PDF), along with a range of tools primarily for audiovisual content creation, editing and publishing.

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application developed by Adobe Inc. and used in the post-production process of filmmaking, animation, video games and television production. Among other things, After Effects can be used for keying, tracking, compositing, and animation. It also functions as a very basic non-linear editor, audio editor, and media transcoder.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985.

Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. Graphic designers and production artists are the principal users, creating and laying out periodical publications, posters, and print media. It also supports export to EPUB and SWF formats to create e-books and digital publications, including digital magazines, and content suitable for consumption on tablet computers. In addition, InDesign supports XML, style sheets, and other coding markup, making it suitable for exporting content for use in digital and online formats.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in raster graphics editing, but in digital art as a whole. Photoshop can edit and compose raster images in multiple layers and supports masks, alpha compositing and several color models. Photoshop uses its own PSD and PSB file formats to support these features.

Adobe Shockwave

Adobe Shockwave (formerly Macromedia Shockwave) is a discontinued multimedia platform for building interactive multimedia applications and video games. Developers originate content using Adobe Director and publish it on the Internet. Such content could be viewed in a web browser on any computer with the Shockwave Player plug-in installed. MacroMind originated the technology; Macromedia acquired MacroMind and developed it further, releasing Shockwave Player in 1995. Adobe then acquired Shockwave with Macromedia in 2005. Shockwave supports raster graphics, basic vector graphics, 3D graphics, audio, and an embedded scripting language called Lingo.

Algorithm

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing calculations, data processing, automated reasoning, and other tasks. Starting from an initial state and initial input, the algorithm’s instructions describe a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined successive states, eventually producing “output” and terminating at a final ending state. Algorithms are essential to the way computers process data. Many computer programs contain algorithms that detail the specific instructions a computer should perform—in a specific order—to carry out a specified task.

Apple

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company that specializes in consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in 1976 to develop and sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. It was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1977, and sales of its computers, including the Apple II, grew quickly. They went public in 1980 to instant financial success. Over the next few years, Apple shipped new computers featuring innovative graphical user interfaces, such as the original Macintosh.

Application Programming Interface (API)

An API is a set of defined rules that explain how computers or applications communicate with one another. APIs sit between an application and the web server, acting as an intermediary layer that processes data transfer between systems.

Arduino

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino boards are able to read inputs—light on a sensor, a finger on a button, or a Twitter message—and turn it into an output: activating a motor, turning on an LED, publishing something online. You can tell your board what to do by sending a set of instructions to the microcontroller on the board. To do so you use the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring), and the Arduino Software (IDE), based on Processing. All Arduino boards are completely open-source, empowering users to build them independently and eventually adapt them to their particular needs. The software, too, is open-source, and it is growing through the contributions of users worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of “intelligent agents”: any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals. Some popular accounts use the term artificial intelligence to describe machines that mimic “cognitive” functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as learning and problem solving. AI applications include advanced Web search engines, recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri or Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g. Tesla), and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go).

Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented reality is computer-generated content overlaid on a real world environment. AR hardware comes in many forms, including devices that you can carry and devices you wear, such as headsets, and glasses. Common applications of AR technology include video games, television, and personal navigation.

BASIC

(Beginners’ All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. The original version was designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz and released at Dartmouth College in 1964. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all computer use required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn.

basil.js

basil.js is a simplified library aimed at designers. It brings scripting and automation into layout and makes computational and generative design possible from within InDesign. Additionally it also includes workflow improvements for data imports from various sources, indexing and complex document management.

C++

C++ is a general-purpose programming language created by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1982 as an extension of the C programming language, or “C with Classes.” The language has expanded significantly over time, and modern C++ now has object-oriented, generic, and functional features in addition to facilities for low-level memory manipulation. It is almost always implemented as a compiled language, and many vendors provide C++ compilers, including the Free Software Foundation, LLVM, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, and IBM, so it is available on many platforms. C++ was designed with an orientation toward system programming and embedded, resource-constrained software and large systems, with performance, efficiency, and flexibility of use as its design highlights.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style-sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript. CSS is designed to enable the separation of presentation and content, including layout, colors, and fonts. The term cascading derives from the specified priority scheme to determine which style rule applies if more than one rule matches a particular element. This cascading priority scheme is predictable.

Commodore C64

The Commodore C64 was a flagship personal computer product of the Commodore company, released in 1982. It was largely recognized as the highest-selling personal computer model of all time, with between 10 and 17 million units sold (according to available estimates). The Commodore C64 was an 8-bit home computer with 64 kB of RAM. It ran on a Commodore BASIC operating system and had a VIC-II graphics card, an external 170 K floppy drive, ports for two joysticks, and a cartridge port. In its time, the Commodore C64 stood out from its competitors in terms of both sound and graphics, with multicolored sprites and three-channel sound that provided what was, for that era, cutting-edge technology. The ability to play Commodore games on the system was only part of the appeal, with a variety of business uses also built into the early computing system.

Commodore VC-20

The Commodore VIC-20 / or VC-20 (known as the VC-20 in Germany and the VIC-1001 in Japan) is an 8-bit home computer that was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore’s first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units.

Database

A database is an organized collection of structured information, or data, typically stored electronically in a computer system. A database is usually controlled by a database management system (DBMS). Together, the data and the DBMS, along with the applications that are associated with them, are referred to as a database system, often shortened to just database. Data within the most common types of databases in operation today is typically modeled in rows and columns in a series of tables to make processing and data querying efficient. The data can then be easily accessed, managed, modified, updated, controlled, and organized. Most databases use structured query language (SQL) for writing and querying data.

DrawBot

DrawBot is a powerful, free application for MacOSX that invites you to write simple Python scripts to generate two-dimensional graphics. The built-in graphics primitives support rectangles, ovals, (Bézier) paths, polygons, text objects and transparency. DrawBot is an ideal tool for teaching the basics of programming. Students get colorful graphic treats while becoming familiar with variables, conditional statements, functions, etc. Results can be saved in a selection of different file formats, including high resolution, scaleable PDF, SVG, movie, PNG, JPEG and TIFF. DrawBot is written in Python. The DrawBot project started in 2003 as a program named DesignRobots, written for a Python workshop at the TypoTechnica conference. Since then the application evolved into a Cocoa application with a powerful API and image export functionality. It has proven itself as a key part of the curriculum at the Royal Academy in The Hague, and is developed by Just van Rossum, Erik van Blokland and Frederik Berlaen.

Dual Licensing

Using dual licensing, licensors can distribute software to licensees under a proprietary model as well as an open-source model, allowing the licensor to simultaneously leverage the advantages of both types of licenses.

EPUB

EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the “.epub” file extension. The term is short for electronic publication and is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones, tablets, and computers. The EPUB format is implemented as an archive file consisting of XHTML files carrying the content, along with images and other supporting files. EPUB is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based e-book format. EPUB is a technical standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum and supported by almost all hardware readers.

e-Reader

An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-reader; however, specialized e-reader devices may optimize portability, readability, and battery life for this purpose. Their main advantages over printed books are portability. An e-reader is capable of holding thousands of books while weighing less than one book. Many e-readers use the Internet through Wi-Fi and the built-in software can provide a link to a digital library or an e-book retailer, allowing the user to buy, borrow, and receive digital e-books.

Flash

Adobe Flash is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash displays text, vector graphics, and raster graphics to provide animations, video games, and applications. It allowed streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera input. Flash was initially used to create fully interactive websites, but this approach was phased out with the introduction of HTML5. Instead, Flash found a niche as the dominant platform for online multimedia content, particularly for browser games. Due to numerous security flaws, the use of Flash declined as Adobe transitioned to the Adobe Air platform. The Flash Player was deprecated in 2017 and officially discontinued at the end of 2020.

Fontographer

Fontographer, developed by James R. Von Ehr for the Mac and released in January 1986, was the first commercially available Bézier curve editing software for a personal computer. High quality fonts in PostScript format could be developed for a fraction of the cost of other existing methods, leading to the democratization of type design. For the first time, numerous self-taught type designers without substantial capital investment could produce fonts for professional use. Fontographer 2.0 was released eight months later, in the fall of 1986. In 1989, Fontographer 3.0 was released, featuring an auto-trace tool and automatic generation of hints for PostScript printer fonts.

For Loop

In computer science, a for-loop (or simply for loop) is a control flow statement for specifying iteration, which allows code to be executed repeatedly. A for-loop has two parts: a header specifying the iteration, and a body which is executed once per iteration. The header often declares an explicit loop counter or loop variable, which allows the body to know which iteration is being executed. For-loops are typically used when the number of iterations is known before entering the loop. For-loops can be thought of as a shorthand for while-loops, which increment and test a loop variable.

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. It was originally developed by John Backus and IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, and subsequently came to dominate scientific computing. It has been in use for over six decades in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, geophysics, computational physics, crystallography and computational chemistry.

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)

A generative adversarial network is a class of machine learning frameworks. Two neural networks contest with each other in a game (in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent’s gain is another agent’s loss). Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set. For example, a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics.

Git

Git is a software that tracks changes in any set of files. It is generally used for coordinating work among programmers who are collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows (thousands of parallel branches running on different systems). Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel, with other kernel developers contributing to its initial development. Since 2005, Junio Hamano has been the core maintainer. As with most other distributed version control systems, and unlike most client-server systems, every Git directory on every computer is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking abilities, independent of network access or a central server. Git is free and open-source software distributed under GNU General Public License Version 2.

GitHub

GitHub, Inc. is a provider of Internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It offers the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, plus its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, continuous integration and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. GitHub offers its basic services free of charge. Its more advanced professional and enterprise services are commercial. Free GitHub accounts are commonly used to host open-source projects.

GitLab

GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developers Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov. GitLab follows an open-core development model where the core functionality is released under an open-source (MIT) license while the additional functionality is under a proprietary license.

Glyphs

Glyphs is a Mac font editor that puts you in control, enabling you to quickly draw high-precision vectors, efficiently reuse shapes, and easily manage any number of letters, figures and symbols. Glyphs is a project of type designers and software developers Georg Seifert and Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer.

Google

Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, a search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware. It is considered one of the big four technology companies along with Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online word processor included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. Google Docs is accessible via an Internet browser as a web-based application and is also available as a mobile app on Android and iOS and as a desktop application on Google’s Chrome OS. Google Docs allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating with other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by user with a revision history presenting changes. An editor’s position is highlighted with an editor-specific color and cursor and a permissions system regulates what users can do.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet program included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. The app allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by user with a revision history presenting changes.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language, better known as HTML, is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be supported by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript. Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document. HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, a contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in late 1990.

HyperCard

HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard includes a built-in programming language called HyperTalk for manipulating data and the user interface. HyperCard is based on the concept of a “stack” of virtual “cards”. Each card contains a set of interactive objects, including text fields, check boxes, buttons, and similar common graphical user interface (GUI) elements. Users browse the stack by navigating from card to card, using built-in navigation features, a powerful search mechanism, or through user-created scripts. HyperCard was originally released in 1987 and was included free with all new Macintosh computers. It was withdrawn from sale in March 2004, having received its final update in 1998 upon the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. HyperCard runs in the Classic environment, but was not ported to Mac OS X.

HyperTalk

HyperTalk is a discontinued highlevel, procedural programming language created in 1987 by Dan Winkler and used in conjunction with Apple Computer’s HyperCard hypermedia program by Bill Atkinson. Because the main target audience of HyperTalk was beginning programmers, HyperTalk programmers were usually called “authors” and the process of writing programs was known as “scripting”. HyperTalk scripts resembled written English and used a logical structure similar to that of the Pascal programming language.

Java

Java is a high-level, class-based, object-oriented programming language that is designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is a general-purpose programming language intended to let application developers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. The Java runtime provides dynamic capabilities (such as reflection and runtime code modification) that are typically not available in traditional compiled languages. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported nine million developers.

JavaScript (JS)

JavaScript is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, and is best known as a scripting language for Web pages, but it’s used in many non-browser environments as well. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. JavaScript runs on the client side of the web, which can be used to design/program how the web pages behave on the occurrence of an event. The basic syntax is intentionally similar to both Java and C++ to reduce the number of new concepts required to learn the language.

Kinect

Kinect is a line of motion-sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The technology includes a set of hardware originally developed by PrimeSense, incorporating RGB cameras, infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flight calculations, and a microphone array, along with software and artificial intelligence from Microsoft to allow the device to perform real-time gesture recognition, speech recognition and body skeletal detection. This enables Kinect to be used as a hands-free natural user interface device to interact with a computer system.

Kinetic Type

Kinetic typography—the technical name for “moving text” or “motion typography”—is an animation technique mixing motion and text to express ideas using video animation.

LaTeX

LaTeX, pronounced “Lah-tech” or “Lay-tech,” is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production medium-to-large technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX is available as free software.

Library (computing)

In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications. A library is also a collection of implementations of behavior, written in terms of a language, that has a well-defined interface by which the behavior is invoked. Library code is organized in such a way that it can be used by multiple programs that have no connection to each other, while code that is part of a program is organized to be used only within that one program. The value of a library lies in the reuse of standardized program elements. When a program invokes a library, it gains the behavior implemented inside that library without having to implement that behavior itself. Libraries encourage the sharing of code in a modular fashion and ease the distribution of the code.

Lingo

Lingo is a verbose object-oriented scripting language developed by John H. Thompson for use in Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director). Lingo is used to develop desktop application software, interactive kiosks, CD-ROMs and Adobe Shockwave content. Lingo is the primary programming language on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product market during the 1990s.

Linux

The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was conceived and created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was created as a free replacement for UNIX. Since then, it has spawned a large number of operating system distributions, commonly also called Linux. Linux is deployed on a wide variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices (including its use in the Android operating system), personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab promotes an interdisciplinary research culture that brings together diverse areas of interest and inquiry. Unique among other laboratories at MIT, the Media Lab comprises both a broad research agenda and a graduate degree program in Media Arts and Sciences. Faculty, students, and researchers work together on hundreds of projects across disciplines as diverse as social robotics, physical and cognitive prostheses, new models and tools for learning, community bioengineering, and models for sustainable cities. Art, science, design, and technology build and play off one another in an environment designed for collaboration and inspiration.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Machine learning focuses on the development of computer programs that can access data and use it to learn for themselves. The process of learning begins with observations or data, such as examples, direct experience, or instruction, in order to look for patterns in data and make better decisions in the future based on the examples that we provide. The primary aim is to allow the computers learn automatically without human intervention or assistance and adjust actions accordingly.

Macintosh

The Macintosh (generally referred to as a Mac since 1998) is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc. (originally Apple Computer, Inc.) since January 1984. The original Macintosh is the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer to have featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. Apple sold the Macintosh alongside its popular Apple II, Apple IIGS, Apple III, and Apple Lisa families of computers until the other models were discontinued in the 1990s.

Macromedia Director

Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director) was a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia and managed by Adobe Systems until its discontinuation in 2017. Director was the primary time-based editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a scripting language called Lingo made Director a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs, stand-alone kiosks and internet video game content during the 1990s.

Material Design

Material Design is a design language developed by Google in 2014. Expanding on the “cards” that debuted in Google Now, Material Design uses more grid-based layouts, responsive animations and transitions, padding, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows.

Max/MSP

Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling ’74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations. The Max program is modular, with most routines existing as shared libraries. An application programming interface (API) allows third-party development of new routines (named external objects). Thus, Max has a large user base of programmers unaffiliated with Cycling ’74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program.

Metafont

Metafont is a description language used to define raster fonts. It is also the name of the interpreter that executes Metafont code, generating the bitmap fonts that can be embedded into PostScript. Metafont was devised by Donald Knuth as a companion to his TeX typesetting system.

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation which produces computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touch-screen personal computers.Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command line tools and for server-side scripting—running scripts server-side to produce dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user’s web browser. Consequently, Node.js represents a “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm, unifying web-application development around a single programming language, rather than using different languages for server-side and client-side scripts.

Open Source

Open-source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. The term originated in the context of software development to designate a specific approach to creating computer programs. Today, however, the term “open source” designates a broader set of values. Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate the principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development. Open-source licenses affect the way people can use, study, modify, and distribute software. In general, open-source licenses grant computer users permission to use open-source software for any purpose they wish. Some open-source licenses—sometimes referred to as “copyleft” licenses—stipulate that anyone who releases a modified open-source program must also release the source code for that program alongside it. Moreover, some open-source licenses stipulate that anyone who alters and shares a program with others must also share that program’s source code without charging a licensing fee for it.

OpenFrameworks

OpenFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding, designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation. The code is written to be massively cross-compatible. OpenFrameworks supports five operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux, iOS, Android) and four IDEs (XCode, Code::Blocks, and Visual Studio and Eclipse). OpenFrameworks is distributed under the MIT License. This gives everyone the freedom to use openFrameworks in any context: commercial or non-commercial, public or private, open or closed source. While many openFrameworks users give their work back to the community in a similarly free way, there is no obligation to contribute. OpenFrameworks is actively developed by Zach Lieberman, Theodore Watson, and Arturo Castro, with help from the OpenFrameworks community.

P5.js

P5.js is a JavaScript library for creative coding created by Lauren Lee McCarthy in 2013. Its purpose is to make coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators and beginners. P5.js is free and open-source. To use the metaphor of a sketch, p5.js has a full set of drawing functionalities. However, one is not limited to a drawing canvas—you can visualize your whole browser page as a sketch pad, including HTML5 objects for text, input, video, webcam, and sound. P5.js is currently led/run?/maintained? by Qianqian Ye and Evelyn Masso.

P5LIVE

p5.js’ collaborative live-coding VJ environment.

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, but it now stands for the recursive initialism PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter implemented as a module, a daemon or as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) executable. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code – which may be any type of data, such as generated HTML or binary image data – would form the whole or part of an HTTP response.

PageBot

PageBot® is a scriptable page layout, vector graphics and typography environment that enables designers to create high quality documents in various print-ready and web-based formats. It is available as a Python library with multiplatform support based on Flat as well as a Mac OS X extension that uses DrawBot. The core library, tutorials and basic examples for PageBot are available under the MIT Open-Source license. PageBot is initiated and developed by Buro, Petr van Blokland and Claudia Mens.

Paged.js

Paged.js is a free and open source JavaScript library that paginates content in the browser to create PDF output from any HTML content. This means you can design works for print (e.g. books) using HTML and CSS.

Paper.js

Paper.js is an open-source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and Bézier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface. Paper.js is developed by Jürg Lehni & Jonathan Puckey, and distributed under the permissive MIT License.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

Portable Document Format (PDF), is a file format developed by Adobe in 1993 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it. PDF files may contain a variety of content besides flat text and graphics, including logical structuring elements, interactive elements such as annotations and form-fields, layers, rich media (including video content), three-dimensional objects, and various other data formats.

PostScript

PostScript is a page description language (PDL) that describes a page’s text and graphical content. It can be used to define the appearance of graphics and text for both screen and print. The language was developed by Adobe in 1984 and has since gone through many revisions and updates. Before PostScript was introduced, publishing systems relied on proprietary typesetting systems, which often caused incompatibilities between computers and printing systems. Adobe PostScript makes it possible to produce high-quality page content that can include text, images, and line art in a standard format compatible with multiple devices. PostScript (.PS) files will print out in the exact same way from any PostScript compatible printer. They can also be opened using Adobe Acrobat and will look consistently the same on Macintosh and Windows platforms. The evolution of PostScript led to the development of Adobe Acrobat, which creates PDF documents.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and framework (CMF) written in the PHP programming language. ProcessWire is built around an API with usage and naming conventions similar to the JavaScript framework jQuery. The stated goal behind the API is to provide the level of accessibility and control to pages in a website that jQuery provides to the DOM. Content is managed either via the API or the web-based admin control panel. ProcessWire is largely used for development of websites, web applications, services, content feeds and related applications.

Processing

Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping. Processing was initiated in Spring 2001 by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. At the time, Fry was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Laboratory and Reas was an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). Processing began as a personal initiative and it was developed over nights and weekends through 2003. MIT indirectly funded Processing through Fry’s graduate stipend and IDII indirectly funded Processing through Reas’s salary. Due to his research agreement with MIT, all code written by Fry during this time is the intellectual property of MIT.

Python

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Its high-level built-in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python’s simple, easy-to-learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed. Python was conceived in the late 1980s by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands as a successor to the ABC programming language, and it was first released in 1991 as Python 0.9.0. Python 2.0 was released in 2000. It introduced new features, such as list comprehensions and a garbage collection system using reference counting. Python 3.0 was released in 2008 and was a major revision of the language that is not completely backward-compatible.

RAWGraphs

RAWGraphs is an open source data visualization framework built with the goal of making the visual representation of complex data easy for everyone. Primarily conceived as a tool for designers and vis geeks, RAWGraphs aims at providing a missing link between spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel, Apple Numbers, OpenRefine) and vector graphics editors (e.g. Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape, Sketch). The project, led and maintained by the DensityDesign Research Lab (Politecnico di Milano) was released publicly in 2013.

React

React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications.

RoboFab

Just van Rossum, Erik van Blokland and Tal Leming developed RoboFab, a Pythonic API to FontLab’s native objects. RoboFab was heavily inspired by RoboFog and their APIs are very similar. A simple toolkit for creating UIs in Python, DialogKit, was also created. All together, this allowed designers to port their old RoboFog scripts to RoboFab. The RoboFab package was distributed freely under an open-source license and worked in both Windows and Mac versions of FontLab. It had a pretty website with very complete documentation and a colorful font object map. RoboFab became popular among font makers and helped them create useful tools to get work done.

RoboFog

RoboFog is a Python-powered version of Fontographer produced by Petr van Blokland in the early 1990s. With Just van Rossum’s help, Van Blokland managed to compile Fontographer with a Python interpreter, and built an API so that the program became scriptable. RoboFog was very successful within its niche market. It included a small toolkit for creating custom UIs in pure Python. Users have a lot of fun with its features, and used it to build tools which were very useful for their workflows.

RoboFont

Written from scratch in Python with scalability in mind, RoboFont is a fully featured font editor with all the tools required for drawing typefaces. It provides full scripting access to objects and interface and a platform for building your own tools and extensions.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based markup language for describing two-dimensional based vector graphics. It is a text-based, open Web standard for describing images that can be rendered cleanly at any size without loss of quality and is designed specifically to work well with other web standards including CSS, DOM, JavaScript, and SMIL. In essence, SVG is to graphics what HTML is to text. SVG images and their related behaviors are defined in XML text files, which means they can be searched, indexed, scripted, and compressed. Additionally, this means they can be created and edited with any text editor or with drawing software. SVG has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999.

Scriptographer

Scriptographer is a scripting plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. It enables the user to extend Illustrator’s functionality through the use of the JavaScript language. Scriptographer allows the creation of mouse-controlled drawing tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones.

Sketchbook

Sketchbook (formerly StudioPaint, Autodesk SketchBook), is a raster graphics software app intended for expressive drawing and concept sketching. The software was first developed by Alias Systems Corporation as StudioPaint, before being acquired by Autodesk and then being spun out into an independent company, Sketchbook, Inc. Originally developed as commercial software, it evolved into a subscription model before eventually being made freeware for personal use.

Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal is a dialect of the Pascal programming language which was sold by Borland International during the 1980s and 1990s for use with the MS-DOS and later Microsoft Windows operating systems. A few versions (1.0 and 1.1) were also released for Apple’s System 6 and System 7. It provided an Integrated Development Environment or IDE, which combined editor, program compiler and execution environments for developing, debugging, and compiling Pascal source code.

Turtle Drawing Robot

The concept can be traced back to William Grey Walter’s work in robotics in the 1940s which investigated complex behaviors in simple systems. Turtle robots are generally slow-moving with tight turning radiuses and can trace a design that shows their behavior over time. They make excellent teaching aides because their programmed output can be seen visually.

Type Foundry

A type foundry is a company that designs and distributes typefaces. Before digital type design, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype, for letterpress printers. Today’s digital type foundries distribute typefaces created by type designers, who may either be freelancers, or employed by the foundry. Type foundries may also provide custom type design services for clients.

Unity

Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 by Apple as a Mac OS X exclusive game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development. The engine can be used to create three-dimensional (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) games, as well as interactive simulations.

User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) refers to the way a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.

User Interface (UI)

User interface (UI) design is the design of interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, mobile devices and other electronic devices, with a focus on maximizing usability for the user.

Variable Font

A variable font is a font file that is able to store a continuous range of design variants. An entire typeface (font family) can be stored in such a file, with an infinite number of fonts, styles and widths available to be sampled. The variable font technology originated in Apple’s TrueType GX font variations. The technology was adapted to OpenType as OpenType variable fonts (OTVF) in version 1.8 of the OpenType specification. The technology was announced by Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in September 2016.

Virtual Reality (VR)

Virtual reality is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (e.g. video games), education (e.g. medical or military training) and business (e.g. virtual meetings).

Web Open Font Format (WOFF)

The Web Open Font Format is a font format for use in web pages. WOFF files are OpenType or TrueType fonts with format-specific compression applied and additional XML metadata added. The primary goals are to distinguish font files intended for use as web fonts from font files intended for use in desktop applications via local installation, and to reduce web-font latency when fonts are transferred from a server to a client over a network connection. The first draft of WOFF 1 was published in 2009 by Jonathan Kew, Tal Leming, and Erik van Blokland. Following the submission of WOFF to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) by the Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software and Microsoft in April 2010, the W3C commented that it expected WOFF to soon become the “single, interoperable [font] format” supported by all browsers. The W3C published WOFF as a working draft in July 2010. The final draft was published as a W3C Recommendation on 13 December 2012.

Web-to-Print

Web-to-Print, also referred to as Web2Print, W2P or Remote Publishing, does not just have one general definition. Many different processes, systems and software fall under this umbrella term. Web-to-Print combines the traditional way of producing print materials, as well as all other processes that take place online, like the creation and publishing process for example. All the following processes are part of Web-to-Print, from the editing of simple templates, uploading and generating print materials to database publishing.

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Secret 7{\textquotedbl}. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.
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Visitors creating posters at Secret 7{\textquotedbl}. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.
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Secret 7{\textquotedbl}, Design Application. DIA Studio, Zach Lieberman and Squarespace, 2018.
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Squarespace Identity. DIA Studio and Zach Lieberman, 2018.

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