hellopanos blog

Creative Review Annual Cover.

For this year’s Creative Review Annual cover, together with Nexus Interactive Arts, Minivegas created a custom application to draw a letter ‘A’ using content from the CR’s website and Twitter feed over the past year.

We decided to make an “A” from CR’s prolific online output. We felt that its form should be implied, discernable by its physical influence on elements from CR’s blog and twitter content. Some of our early efforts were a little abstract, but we settled for wrapping thousands of strips of tape in the loose shape of the “A”. The strips would contain words and pictures from the blog. Using recent blog activity doesn’t cut it for an annual, so with “a little wget magic”, we slurped every article and image from the last year. We got 10,000 unique proper names and places, hashtags and usernames, and about another 5,000 pictures. That’s a lot, even for six images, so the number of comments on a blog post became a metric for how “big” a story and its content ended up in the final image (like a “tag cloud”). To add some dynamics, we ran the scene as a cloth simulation to blow our strips around a bit. Exploding the letter is fun, though in the end the shapes looked a bit messy so we toned that down a bit. Final snapshots of strips in motion were exported for a high-quality render.

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