LO 1 – My Inspiration

Looking Outwards Text – 01
Iris Yip / 15-104 D

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A project focusing on computational art that really inspires me is Angela He’s ‘A Coding Project a day for 20 days’. It is a series of small coding projects (web-based) done over the course of a few weeks ranging from simple mechanisms like sliders to loading screens to interactive mini-games.

The premise of the project was to help her develop skills that she could use for her future, larger-scale projects like developing webpages and/or games. I thought breaking down the daunting task of learning to code into smaller, more feasible tasks was a great way to get into coding and overcome its admittedly daunting nature for beginners. I was really fascinated by her easy-to-follow documentation of her journey, and was inspired to take this class and learn coding for myself because of how she broke it down into simpler steps and incorporated illustration and visual elements, which really intrigued and excited me. I found that the coding brought an additional layer of interaction to her visual works and opened up a lot of possibilities that don’t necessarily exist in traditional types of 2D art like illustration. The balance between code and art really appealed to me as a designer, and I really admire the casual nature of the project and how she let herself learn by doing and taking inspiration from others without copying.

She explored a lot of different softwares for coding, as well as different online resources including GitHub and even going into Chrome Developer to see for herself the kind of code a webpage might use.

On the project page, she goes into a lot of detail about what inspires her, including projects hosted on websites like CodePen, and Awwwards. For visuals, she also looked at websites like Behance and dribbble. She is relatively well known for her illustrations and her visual novels (completed for Ludum Dare, a game jam competition.)

REFERENCE:
Project Link
Author: Angela He, also known as ‘zephybite’