Dream here

I’ve been looking at generative logo’s for some time, the first one I ever came across was the Casa da Música logo by Sagmeister. More recently the MIT Media Lab launched their generative identity, and other well known organisations like TATE are using generative logo’s too.

It sure is a fact that generative identities are popping up all over the place these days. It’s interesting to see how designers are extending there toolsets with programs like processing in order to create these new type of logo’s and identities. To me, this is an example of how thin the line between design and programming has become.

In order to explore this further, I used the logo competition by sigchi.be as a personal case. Sigchi.be is the belgian chapter of Sigchi (special interest group computer human interaction), brining together people in CHI related topics from both industry and academia. Currently they’re looking for a new identity in order to engage more people in the community. My identity proposal-idea was pretty straight forward, since CHI is all about “people” and “computers” I thought of having an endless variation on a human figure. This would represent “people” because it’s a human figure and “computer” because the variations imaginable on this figure are endless.

This resulted in the following proposal, created with nodebox2:

It’s still very much a work in progress, but it just shows how accessible rather complex computational technology is becoming. And because the tools are not only to be understood by people with a background in technical programming/development, more creative or non-trivial applications are bound to emerge. These are interesting times.