Creating Displays with Processing
Again, this blog post is part of my basic techniques module, so you might not find this thrilling… casual readers might want to skip this blog post and come back later.
As part of my basic techniques module I wanted to work on something quite simple. I’ve broken it down into lots of smaller chunks, and this chunk that I’ve been working on refers to how you would move the data gathered from counting words within a text to a graphical display.
Here I’ve used a ellipse to represent a number between zero and three-hundred and sixty. The finished project won’t have that sort of word limit, and the use of an ellipse would not be a good design feature, but for the purposes of this sketch it works pretty well. Some of the important parts are that the sketch communicates the values from inside a for loop (which, in the final project, will count through the words of the document as an array), it uses rollover style data display, and it has a selection of choices from which you can pick to display different data.
Obviously, this is a mock-up in several different ways, and the data doesn’t actually mean anything – it’s more an experiment to see the data and see how it would be crafted in Processing. Some things that I’m not happy with are the immense amount of code that it takes to do the rollover affect (should that be a class by itself?) and the placement of the text above the smaller arcs. I also think that the actually main display could be better, by rounding off the value to a straight int rather than a four-point decimal.
Click on the image above to see the sketch in action and to download the source code.
