Color

Expressing design in a program means that at some point you have to give values to ideas in unpleasantly specific dimensions. Necessary but not a nice thing to do. Because it's design — you don't know everything yet, you're still figuring it out. But already you have to come up with real data. The program itself provides a solution: make it guess and postpone the decisions.

If you're not sure about a value, think about its opposite: which values are out of the question. The program will generate various alternatives between those extremes. Perhaps you like one of the results, or maybe you like the variation. Either way, seeing the range of possibilities will push the creative mind in the right direction. Then the boundaries are tuned to more appropriate values and the design begins to take form. The program contains the design, it is a designmachine.

How can this be applied to typography and design? In these samples various rules are applied to color, type and form. Some colors are completely random, others have structured factors as well as random ones. If you see one you like, take it. If not, change the rules and regenerate. The computer can be a slotmachine of colors.