A Hoot of Many Colors – a wooden puzzle for birders

https://player.vimeo.com/video/956258307?dnt=1

Hoo’s ready for a puzzling adventure? A Hoot of Many Colors is a vibrant wooden jigsaw puzzle featuring a Great Horned Owl, with over twenty whimsical birds hidden inside. This avian puzzle is the feathered successor to our popular Herding Cats jigsaw puzzle. Owl you need is some patience and a keen eye as you solve this challenging and egg-citing puzzle. Perfect for bird lovers and puzzle enthusiasts, this intricate design is sure to be a real hoot!

After the success of our cat puzzle, we’ve had many requests for a follow up (okay mostly for a dog puzzle, don’t worry...

Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences

https://amygoodchild.substack.com/embed

I’m coding a system in JavaScript that generates sentences of “meaningful nonsense”. Here are some examples.

Coding my Handwriting

https://amygoodchild.substack.com/embed

A familiar theme for me is dismissing an idea as being too much work and then later finding myself doing it anyway. That’s what happened here.

A little while ago I created a block script in JavaScript, thinking that cursive would be too complex. But here I am, two months later, ready to talk about the cursive handwriting I’ve created. There is perhaps a lesson in that but let’s not dwell on it.

This previous article is about my block printed version of the alphabet. As a summary, I created...

the Eclipse Puzzle

https://player.vimeo.com/video/943768444?dnt=1

Celebrate the celestial marvel of a total solar eclipse with Nervous System’s Eclipse Puzzle. One side of the puzzle features the sun and the other the moon. By flipping over the pieces you can turn day to night, as the moon gradually eclipses the sun. The Eclipse puzzle has 248 double-sided wood pieces with 5 special space themed whimsies. It can be assembled in multiple ways: the sun, the moon, a total eclipse showing the moon with the sun’s corona, and three stages of the moon blocking out the sun. The Mini Eclipse Puzzle, featuring 102 pieces, is a smaller...

Xylem Arbor

https://player.vimeo.com/video/648392146?dnt=1

We recently created our first large scale public artwork. Soaring to a height of 120′, Xylem Arbor is an aggregation of bent metal leaves that climb up the atrium walls of the TEN30 corporate campus in Charlotte, North Carolina. The shape and pattern of the metal leaves evolves as the sculpture ascends. Each leaf features an intricate perforated pattern which is algorithmically generated based on simulations of natural processes.

The Xylem Arbor explores patterns of circulatory systems in plants and throughout the biological world through the lens of science and computation. The sculpture is composed...

Masterful concepts

What an amazing illustrator Whooli Chen is. Hailing currently from Taiwan, she earned a MA degree at the University of the Arts London. Her delicately sketched elements are always coloured with a subdued and calming palette.

What about her masterful compositions? This is a skill that is essential for all illustrators: from editorial process to concept.

Eskimo + heat?

A long time alumni Eskimo Design Studio have retained their original ethos—passionately dedicated to saving the world from the ugly and impractical saboteurs of interior design. Oh gotta love this quote!

They love making heat! A bit obscure? Not at all if you know they are product designers who specialize in heat systems.

Neuron and Mycoplasma Puzzles with art by David S. Goodsell

Two new biology themed puzzles from Nervous System! They feature the incredible artwork of scientist/artist David S. Goodsell, whose intricate, vibrant watercolor paintings explore the dense landscape of machinery that powers the cell. The Neuron Puzzle (423 pieces, $120) dives into the structure of an axon. That’s the part of a brain cell that carries electrical impulses to communicate with other cells. There’s also the Mycoplasma Puzzle (134 pieces, $50) a small puzzle which looks at one of the simplest known living organisms, Mycoplasma mycoides. Measuring only 300 nm this bacteria is the prototypical example of what makes life and...

Generating The Alphabet

https://amygoodchild.substack.com/embed

My current generative artwork-in-progress includes text, but I don’t want to use a font. In browser based art work, using a “web safe” font could produce inconsistent results, while including a font file would mean a large file size. Additionally, I don’t want a visual element of the project to be something I didn’t create myself.

Instead of using a font, I made my own path-based alphabet using p5.js and JavaScript.

I started by looking into what the various points on a font are called.

Corollaria Branch for MIT

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=pVNwUMWGO0s

Corollaria Branch by Nervous System at MIT. photo credit: Emily Katrencik

In the end of January, we traveled to MIT to teach a workshop for undergraduates hosted by MIT’s Morningside Academy for Design (MAD). The result of the weeklong workshop is a new sculpture, Corollaria Branch, which was built in collaboration with our students and is now installed in an outdoor courtyard at MIT. MAD produced a video about the workshop which you can watch below or on Youtube. The 9 foot long aluminum sculpture is made of 130 flat aluminum panels generated by custom software. The hollow tree-like form of...