As the purpose of this website has shifted over the years, I’ve decided that the old way of organizing it was no longer ideal. So I’ve moved a few things around. I’ve split Work into Work and Play, giving me a place to put all my non-architecture related projects. I’ve ditched the resume tab as I don’t think it ever made much sense. In its place, I’ve added a Photography page to place the galleries I’ve made over the years. I’ve even dug into my archives and made some new galleries, including for the sets I had previously put on Flickr, which I no longer use.

Check out the new photo page here.

Another patch of pixel sorting tests. These are a ton of fun to make.

I’ve added a few more variables to tweak in the pixel sorting script. There’s always a moment of discovery in working out the best approach to modifying a specific image. Each one is different and lends itself to a different style.

Here is some further refinement on the pixel sorting script. Setting up effected ranges for brightness and saturation was relatively straightforward. However, Hue was little more complicated because it’s not just 0-100 scale, it’s a continuous wheel of color. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, it wraps around so that the highest value is right next to the lowest value. What you call 0 and what you call 100 is completely arbitrary. So in order to avoid arbitrary breaks, I had to make the values wrap around. You can actually see an example of the arbitrary breaks that happen in the last image I posted yesterday. It happens in the red to orange range which is where the values go from 100 back to 0.

Returning to some pixel sorting, I had to start over since I lost my old code at some point. I decided to start with a script made by Kim Asendorf which sorts pixels based on their brightness. I’ve modified it so that it can now sort by hue, saturation, and brightness similar to my previous script. The main difference between this script and my old one is that it uses starting and stopping points to limit the sorting. With the right settings, you can get some very cool glitch effects which I really like. I want to keep refining this so that I can set ranges of values rather than just a single value for each variable.

I’ve decided that the time is right to step away from the large corporate architecture environment and get back to my roots of working with smaller design focused firms. That is why, as of this week, I have resigned my position at PBK Architects and accepted a new position as an associate principal at RdlR Architects. This will give me the opportunity to get my hands dirty doing everything from design to business development as well as getting to work on a greater variety of projects. I’m excited to see what the future holds as I enter this next chapter in my life. I will miss the many great people I had the opportunity to work with at PBK and I wish them all the best.

I’ve uploaded some new images for a few of the building projects I’ve worked on over the last seven years. You can find them on the Work page, or click on the links below. There should be more additions coming in the near future.

The triangular tile set I generated is a good example of how you can use binary numbers to describe a set of objects. This is a very useful tool for doing any sort of computational work with this kind of set. The triangle tiles each have 4 regions that can either be filled or empty. On or Off. 1 or 0. Therefore each possible tile can be described with a 4 digit binary number, each digit corresponding to one of the 4 regions. This opens up lots of possibilities. For example, if you wanted to rotate a tile, you could just shift the values of each digit to get the correct result. I used a similar technique when I was working with Color Gradients that tied each property of a gradient to digits in a numerical sequence. This allowed me to generate new gradients computationally using a genetic algorithm.

Today I learned about a great website called mapchart.net that lets you generate color coded maps of the United States. I decided to test it out by making a map of all the places I have been in the US. I probably missed a few from my early years, but one thing is for sure, there is still a ton left to see!

I was recently inspired to revisit the concept I had previously explored using hex maps. This time, I was curious to see some of the different combinations of triangular tiles. Each triangular tile is broken into four parts by lines that bisect the three edges. Looking at every combination of fill and void for these four pieces results in 16 unique tiles.

I rendered the tiles as solid black to allow the tiles to blend together so that it is harder to see the original grid. I really like the larger contiguous pieces that span multiple tiles. The results remind me of the old puzzle game IZZI which uses similarly divided squares. Looking at it now, I’m sure I was subconsciously thinking of IZZI when I made the tiles pure black and white. I would be interested to see how well the rules of that game could be applied to triangular tiles.