Python for Visual Designers

Type@Cooper Public Workshop

Summer 2024

Instructor: Maurice Meilleur

Meetings: get in touch on our Slack

There’s a Slack workspace and Zoom link available only to students.

Course description

Designers use tools to help us get our work done, but we rarely consider how much these tools can box us into certain processes and solutions in our work. Creating our own tools can lead us down new and unexpected avenues in our designs: some of the best visual ideas can come about by setting up some boundaries — a color palette, a typeface or two — and then running wild within the system. And working out a system in code is a great way to explore these ideas: computers love repetition and can quickly make hundreds of variations on a theme, and mistakes in the code can result in something that often looks better than what was originally intended. No programming experience is necessary for this course, but students should be comfortable doing some arithmetic and basic geometry. Workshop participants will learn the basics of the Python programming language while working in the free DrawBot application for MacOS. A quick sketch made with code in DrawBot can be saved as a .pdf as a starting point to be finished later in Illustrator, or, with a little bit more work in the code editor, an entire book, magazine or animation can be built without even launching Illustrator or InDesign. Using the fundamentals of the Python programming language, students will sketch to create vector art with code and use the basic principles of design to turn their sketches into PDF documents, animated .gifs, and videos.

Required Materials

• A Mac running OS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later
• A fast enough internet connection for video calls
• This class will be held online, so using the Zoom desktop app is recommended

Links & resources

DrawBot and Python documentation, as well as DrawBot script collections for you to try out and tweak. Read more»

Schedule

Class sessions are 18.30–20.30 US Eastern

• Session 01 / 10 July / Loops and shapes
• Session 02 / 17 July / Objects and canvas
• Session 03 / 24 July / Text and image
• Session 04 / 31 July / Paths and formatted strings
• Session 05 / 7 August / Curves and animation

Code

A record of the scripts that we write together in class. Links will become active after each session is concluded.

• Session 01 code
• Session 02 code
• Session 03 code
• Session 04 code
• Session 05 code

Challenges

Our version of homework: solve problems and practice skills we cover in class. Skip ahead, or riff on these to make and solve your own problems. Possible solutions are available if you want to peek. Post what you make in #show_and_tell on Slack.

• Session 01 challenges
• Session 02 challenges
• Session 03 challenges
• Session 04 challenges

Recordings

All class sessions are recorded. Links will become active after each session is concluded. Please don’t share these videos with anyone outside of our class.

• Session 01 recording pt 1
• Session 01 recording pt 2 (Note: session 01 recordings were made/posted by Type@Cooper and will remain available until 30 September 2024)
• Session 02 recording
• Session 03 recording
• Session 04 recording
• Session 05 recording

Credits

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to: Just van Rossum, who taught me how to write Python code; Andy Clymer; and David Jonathan Ross—all of whom have taught various versions of this course for Type@Cooper. The structure of our course this session closely matches DJR’s approach, and we’ll be using a lot of his and Just’s code.