May 25, 2006 | Richard Bird | 0 Comments

Processing

One of the few moving speakers at AIGA’s recent Move3 conference in New York was Casey Reas. Not only was he able to form complete sentences and thoughts ;) but I found the focus of his work, Processing to be irresistible.

Just a few years ago, Casey and colleague, Ben Fry, set out to make the process of writing code more accessible to visual artists. On April 20, 2005, Processing 1.0 was released. It’s an open source project, growing daily as it’s fed by the visual computing community at large.

From their website:

[Processing] is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I think they’ve succeeded.

Most interesting to me as a designer is Processing’s application in creating visual expressions from data sources of many kinds.

Software is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. There’s no shortage of helpful information on getting started and plenty of really fascinating examples.

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