That Was The Week That Was — 23rd June 2019

It felt like I had put a sign across my website to say "open for business", as this week seemed to be all about new work enquiries, so whilst I was working away on the current project for Bulb, I was also answering emails and having phone calls with potential new clients.

As part of that process I was asked by one such new client if I could put a document together detailing my process of how something goes from nothing to something. A fair enough request as it's easy to think that what you do is obvious but of course that's often not the case at all, so I spent a morning putting together a PDF showing how I created the work for Trend Micro — from sketches to final animation — to illustrate how I work. A couple of days after sending it I woke up to find the project has been given the go ahead which was great news.

After an email and a call with Gary Hustwit it was time to dust off the Generative Film Engine project and start working on a new iteration as Gary has some exciting meetings coming up about it.

Meanwhile I was reaching the last parts of this project for Bulb, though it didn't help that for some reason I could no longer get to the API on my desktop machine, yet could over 4G. All very weird, but luckily I had been saving out previous responses to a JSON file and so could use that and be able to carry on with the work. I think it's coming together nicely now.

Affinity Photo is something I've been using for a while as an alternative to Photoshop (which I still have at this point), but my version of Illustrator (CS6) was really showing its age, so when I saw there was 20% off all Affinity products I bought Designer as well. I have to say I'm now using it for all my design work and it is wonderful. It can open and export PSD and AI files, and it can handle really large documents with ease. I have to say the transition from Illustrator to Designer was easy as so many of the shortcuts are the same. I'm going to give it a week or so but I think I may be ditching Adobe for good.

Saw this great implementation of a mesh generation algorithm and the associated paper that inspired it. Need to investigate this further.