A video of the show at CalArts is available, too (viewable at the expense of audio quality).

Those islands—see?—are just mountaintops
	submerged in melted glaciers. (Long ago.)
This hilly city could well have been
	an archipelago.
Their ragged silhouette must have caught his eye
	one sunset.
He made a boat from pieces of the world
	to get there—to get there—
and set out with his floating craft,
	a paddle and no almanac
but he learned the tide, like a song—
	a very long song—and kept the time.
A few days later, he scraped back
	onto the sandy shore.
The sea birds had built a city there,
	painted in white—a city of birds!—
of every feather, a city of birds!
A city of birds! A city of birds!

The Layout Generator is an automated system to turn blog-like, long-scrolling-column HTML into rich, print-ready PDFs with more a varied visual depth and flow. The actual forms of the layouts—where images appear, how they interact with the running flow of text, etc.—are determined by a combination of some simple heuristics along with markup cues which enable non-designers to create compelling layouts. Here’s a short example article which demonstrates just a few of the typographic and layout possibilities.

e-flux’s booth at Printed Matter’s NY ART BOOK FAIR, October 2009. The poster-sized layouts were designed by hand, but the journals themselves were largely computer-generated.

This project proposed a solid methodology for generative work (be it in design, music, etc.): first take a hand-crafted sample artifact (in this case, Jeff Ramsey’s designs); analyze and articulate the intuitive process behind it; then write that out in systemic code. We had to tease out Jeff’s aesthetic decision-making process in meetings in order to systemize it. Yes, it feels a bit like the Taylorization of intellectual production: you must train the robot that will replace you (or at least train the engineer building it).

In its current state, the system is about 1k lines of Ruby, using Prawn for PDF writing, along with a whole slew of other RubyGems from Hpricot to Sinatra. I’m hoping to grow this as we implement more of Jeff’s designs and possibly concoct a few new ones by accident.

Thanks go to Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood at e-flux for making this work possible.

It seems like browsers could afford a much richer visual experience. I looked to a proven technology from antiquity for a metaphor: the codex book. The book, like the scroll before it, works because you trace a linear path through information, with the past/read information on one side, and the future/unread information on the other.

I ran with that in a quick prototype (built in jQuery) with zazzy animations for the reader’s progress through information. (I didn’t hang onto any romanticized page-turning metaphor like we did with Triple Canopy; instead, I wanted to keep multiple documents, or at least excerpts from each, visible in a single glance. The more useful context, the better!) In this video demo, footnotes & external links appear consistently in the right column with contextualizing text; the reader clicks a few, then navigates back to a previously-read text by clicking on it in the left column, where it has been shifted.

This way, each link click wouldn’t just wheat-paste over your reading context, but reinforce the greater context of your reading narrative in a unified, designed way. At any moment, you have deeper visibility into what you’ve read (how you got here) and what further related content exists (where you might go). Although we can, practically speaking, only read one document at a time, I think our spatial memory is capable of holding onto a lot more—and our graphics cards are certainly up to it!

This prototype was prepared as part of a unique presentation last month to Scott Sassa and Neeraj Khemlani at the Hearst Corporation, through Louise Sandhaus‘ class Mutant Design: The Future of Publications. Many thanks to all of them for enabling this work. The full PDF of my presentation is available, although I’ve changed some of the wording & thinking since I wrote it.

DOWNLOAD INSTRUCTIONS PDF

These four recordings come from a run-through in Sara Roberts’ Media Theory class, for which the piece was written. Our haphazard 12-piece ensemble was: guitar, banjo, violin, viola, double bass, 2 sopranos, shakuhachi, laptop, melodica, piano, percussion. Each recording began with the (randomly-selected) ‘texture card’ pictured.

This is definitely a take-home game. You can use texture cards like the ones I prepared above or create/google your own. If you do get a group together to play, please share the recordings!!