Hi all - just a quick one for you all, if you’ve bought the fantastic Converge [LIVE] CD+DVD and ripped onto your computer to get it on your iPod, then perhaps you’d enjoy some lovely cover art to go with it.
Just download this image here and then select the whole album in iTunes and go to FILE->GET INFO. There you’ll see a big empty white square on the right side, just drag and drop this image into there and press OK - then you’re done.
So while sitting down to get the CD+DVD artwork done the other day I thought to myself that it might be semi-interesting to detail for you guys just how we generate the logos around here. The generative art part of NCYC09 is something I promised to explain a long way back, so here goes and let’s try and do that.
Nodebox - www.nodebox.net
This is a free application for the mac made by a lovely group of university students that uses Python programming (yuk!) to generate artwork. Basically, what happens is we tell the program “draw a circle that is 100pixels from the top and 100pixels from the left” - and it does. From there, you change things a little “draw 10 circles that are randomly somewhere between 0 and 100 pixels from the top and randomly somewhere between 0 and 100 pixels from the left” - and it does just that looping through whatever we ask it to do randomly (or semi randomly as you’ll find out later on) drawing what we ask.
Clearly it all gets a little more complex than that to end up with something useful, but that’s the basics.
The Converge design didn’t start off being exactly what it is today, and that’s another post that I’ll write up soon, but for now, let’s say the generative design started as a bunch of lines randomly coming and going.
We worked on this for a while, throwing in some colour, and putting in a few ’static’ lines that were placed permanently in the right locations, but it all still seemed a little pre-planned.
So, there’s a nifty little plugin for Nodebox called ‘Pixie’ which is what we use for the scribbles part of the NCYC design. Pixie takes a series of structured information (man, do I sound like some sort of science teacher or what…ugh) that would normally be zapped out into a ‘tree’ diagram and then makes it look like a 4 year old child scribbled away at a page for a while. It also has a crazy thing called a ‘distraction factor’ which decides how much it spells things wrong and scribbles out and corrects, and how much it puts random squares and scribbles all over the place. Basically it lets us define how hard it is to read the end result! This is how we end up with cool things like “Good Newsy” and “Discipleshop” or “Jebuzzer” written on things, because the computer spelt stuff wrong and then tried to fix it. Fan-tastic eh?
So how do we end up with the craziness that is the Converge logo then? Well… let me try and walk through this and then I’ll post up the code and you can play along at home if you want.
First, we make the background black - that’s important 
And the foreground colour (the colour of our scratchy bits) to white.
size(800,600)
colormode(CMYK)
fill(0,0,0,1)
rect(0,0,WIDTH,HEIGHT)
pixie.color(0,0,0,0)
Now we slap the Converge, NCYC part of the logo down.
image("ConvergeNCYC09.ai", (WIDTH/2-350), HEIGHT/2-50,450)
Next, we setup all the data that is going to be scribble - all this from the brain of Adrian Greenwood who fleshed out a bunch of words from the Theme & Theology crazy-large document. This, in fact, is probably the first time most people have been able to READ this info!
root = "NCYC09"
n1 = ("Mark", ("the call","journey","cost","following","proclamation","teaching","greatness","confession","transfiguration","sending out","discipleship","political fate","implications","non-violence","servant hood"))
n2 = ("Mark", ("1:1-13","1:14-20","2:13-17","10:32-45","12:28-34","4:21-32","8","4:35-41","6:1-13"))
n3 = ("Radical Discipleship", ("perspective","biblical","interpretation","personal","social","recognition","salvation","control","political",
"institutional","cultural","systemic","personal","earthly","spiritual","systems"))
n4 = ("Identity", ("understand","human","divine","picture","liberation","humanness","self","focus","justice","peace","greatness",
"fame","popularity","valuing culture","power","body","image","stolen generation","asylum seekers","value of life","war"))
n5 = ("Converge", ("beloved","hear","places","hope","peace","justice","welcoming","recognising","journeyed","bearer","loved"))
n6 = ("Merge", ("follow","proclaimed","world","building","community","belonging","theology","engage","action"))
n7 = ("Urge", ("true","love","greatness","life","radically","contrast","transformation","teaching","preparation","service"))
n8 = ("Submerge", ("seeds","change","causes","cultures","issues","participation","action","service","protest","prayer","publicly",
"declaring","rally"))
n9 = ("Emerge", ("hope","questions","struggles","following","reflecting","recovering","leading","commitment","covenanting"))
n10 = ("Verge", ("down","returning","presence","support","movement","journey","communities","help","continue","journey","discipleship"))
n11 = ("Diverge", ("Converge", "NCYC09"))
nodes = (n1,n2,n3,n4,n5,n6,n7,n8,n9,n10,n11)
Set the ‘distraction factor’ to a make it a little scratchy, and then we draw a tree of info. Then another and another - sometimes 7!
pixie.distraction(0.6)
pixie.spacing(random(.8,1))
pixie.tree(root, nodes, WIDTH/2, HEIGHT/2, WIDTH, HEIGHT, pt=35)
Then we set that foreground colour across to black now, and draw some more scribbles across the top of the logo - we only realised that we could do this late on in the design process and it makes each of the logos even more random as sometimes there’s nearly a whole letter that is scribbled out - I love when that happens!
pixie.keywords()
pixie.color(0,0,0,1)
pixie.distraction(1)
pixie.tree(root, nodes, 150, HEIGHT/2, WIDTH, HEIGHT, pt=45)
Now that we’ve scribbled over everything we can we put the Uniting Church logo in it’s snug little spot, as it has to be looked after and not hurt by our evil evil scribbles.
image("UCA.ai", (WIDTH/2-16), HEIGHT/2+115,125)
And then bam, you’re done - we can export stuff from Nodebox as a PDF, so we do that, it asks how many generations we want to do - generally we’ll do about 50 variations and then look at them all and pick the nicest one for the occasion.
So there you have it and here you have it, the files below are all zipped up and you can have a play at home if you download your own copy of Nodebox (only on a mac, sorry everyone else - there is another peice of software called Processing that runs on the PC if you’re interested, but this code won’t work with it). The easiest way to have a play is download Nodebox, unzip all these files supplied here, open the .PY file and then press Command-R which ‘runs’ the code to show you one generation. Repeat and you’ll get another one. Try changing around words, colours etc.etc.
Download the Converge logo stuff - ZIP 2MB
So that’s it for now - more on the different options we had for logos next time I get around to writing something vast for the Design Blog and in the meantime, if you’re after some CRAZY generative art, checkout joshuadavis.com, amazing amazing work.
A taste of what’s to come…
Well, no place like a blog to write this - stuff to get done on the NCYC website:
Thanks for listening! Hopefully this will give you a taste of what’s to come… or not.
Oh, and
So, just a teaser (or is that tee-ser)… so you know… on the hush hush… there’s some new T-Shirts on the way. So if you haven’t got the current one, I’d be calling and hoping there’s one left in your size, because they’re pretty much gone as gone can be.
Also - let’s play a little NCYC.org.au “Spot the Difference” - Can you spot what changed on the frontpage of the site this week? (Hint: There’s two things).
Cheerio
So Mike sent me these the other day, it’s some of the design files from NCYC’99 which was in Geelong. I thought I’d throw up an image or two to see whether it made anyone feel old.
I still don’t know if I believe them when people tell me they actually scanned a dead fish… I’m sure someone can prove it.
Also, stay tuned, the website will finally start regenerating intself soon - all automagic-like, isn’t it exciting?
OK - so I’ve had a few people ask already for logos they can use themselves, so until the full kit is up for you to download and work with, here’s an ‘on black’, ‘on white’ and ‘black + white’ version of the Converge logo.
PLEASE NOTE:
These logos are available for download under conditions, which you accept by downloading the files from this website.
If you have had your logo file for more than 60 days, please return to this site and download new ones. The random elements “generate” daily, and should ideally be different every time they are used.
The appropriate logo should be used for a given purpose. For example, on a white page, the “On-white” logo should be used. On a black page, the “On-black” should be used. The logo should never appear in a reversed-out rectangle of black or white. For example, the “On-black” logo should not be used in a black rectangle on a white page.
The only solid colours which the logo is to be used on top of are white, black, or red.
The one-colour logo in black or white is the only logo to be used on top of coloured photographs, unless other approval is granted. (Ask us - chances are the answer will be yes, but we’d love to make sure you have the right file for the job!!)
The logo files should never be scaled dis-proportionately.
The minimum size of the logo is governed by the height of the word CONVERGE. The minimum height of the word CONVERGE is 10mm or 200px
The logo should have a minimum 15% clearance space around it on all sides, or 10mm - which ever is the greater.
These logos may not be used in the preparation of any form of official stationery - there are specific files coded for this purpose to stop fraudulent use of the logos.
And finally, these logos are made available to assist you in the preparation of high quality materials. If you have problems with high quality reproduction, please contact us - its really important to us that the integrity of the design is maintained for the whole 2 years leading up to NCYC2009.
If you have specific questions about the application of the logo, please don’t hesitate to email us! We’re super-friendly and helpful, and chances are we have a logo suitable for your purpose on-file and ready to go.
Something which will be explained a little more later on is that the logo is actually ‘Generative‘. This basically means that everytime we create a logo, it is generated differently - but the same - but… differently. Woah, you can see why I’ll explain more on that later.
Until then, enjoy the following (click for full version, or just right click and save target):
The process of getting to where the NCYC 2009 design is now was an odd but fast one - the tale will unfold here shortly – as I’m at NCYC 2007 right now and there’s only so much time to waste writing stuff here until afterwards! The whole design process was blogged up until now so it will get transferred and updated ASAP!
We’ll be covering all the past, present and FUTURE design work involved in NCYC2009 in this blog over the coming months (and years!), and also this will be your place to collect any logos, images etc. that you may need for any promotions you may be running at your own churches. Also, if you need a hand designing anything do get in touch with us, we may just have time to help out!