I’ve been a motion graphics designer for almost 10 years now. I used After Effects for years but now I am learning this new node-based motion tool called Cavalry. I knew I wanted to do something with text and/or with psychedelic visuals as this is an aesthetic I am pretty known for. I looked through this website where people share their projects called Scenery.io. I suggest everyone to check it out as what this program can do with very little nodes is just amazing. Anyway, I found a lot of isnpirations but what caught my attention the most is text. I love typography. Most of my projects are typography based like this Unfinished project that I worked on for a couple of days.
But I got stuck with the project being static as it needs to be laser cut because I really wanted to make motion graphics with code through p5 but I understand this might be a little too challenging and not even suitable for the assignment and I tried to recreate a picture I saw before expermenting with the final design with text. Here’s the picture I found.
So here’s my best attempt at it, the eyes generate procedurally and randomly. through a function and different parameters. (I added background to the sketch)
I was like ok. cool. not how i like it but cool. let me try with text. Little did I know that that was a mistake because had I laser cut this before coding the next sessions I would have learned about an issue that I will talk about later in this post.
I got inspired by one of the sketches professor jack showed us where he tried to replicate randomness and I wanted to do it with question marks. Here’s my attempt at that (I love it). It is also randomly generated.
The last attempt was with text. This cut took 35 freaking minutes!!!! Now I know to go for more simplistic designs haha. I also used the custom font UniNeue-Trial-HeavyItalic.ttf
p5.js Web Editor | questions? copy
I would say the issues I have had with minimal as I am comfortable with laser cutting. This is probably the assignment I enjoyed the most in uni and I will be doing a lot of this to decorate my room. I just need to keep in mind the print time. I really wanted to work with etching and engraving but the lab assistants told me lets not do that for now. maybe next time 🙂
I think the thing that really challenged my way of thinking is that I always like to go for colors. This time since i am laser cutting, I payed special attention to contrast and to not worry about that honestly I just went for black and white. but still, the possibilties are endless! what if I could tell the machine at some parts to not burn as hard while im engraving and create shades? also, the burn marks that are left on the wood really added to my design aesthetics: here are the final results:
You can see the eye one got messed up because I didnt think that I was also cutting around the puple and that there will be nothing to hold the pupils in the middle. So, the more you learn!
