It's great fun building visually interesting digital sideprojects however nothing quite beats a physical product. Recently I combined the two by taking advantage of being able to utilise one of the staff benefits of working at MOO, free printing, to turn a digital creation into printed posters.
Pictures of finished product
Here are the finished printed posters on show! This year has been about stepping away from the keyboard and doing more projects in the real world - the wall and slightly wonky switch in the below picture are part of this year's big project - my shed. The posters add a touch of colour and brightness to the space.
Selection of posters fresh off the MOO press.
Source side project
The sideproject that was used to create these posters is called Geometric Genrator. Back in April 2015 I was playing around with how to use javascript to drag and drop in the browser. Also I wanted to create something visually interesting. At the time a number of projects (e.g. the hero image on Unicornhunt.io) were using shapes with different shades to create fantastic looking images and backdrops. Using this as inspiration I built a random pattern generator that took a base colour and then displayed a number of square split into triangles with different shades of the base colour. The control panel allows you to set the colour and size of squares and then to highlight an area and download as an image.
Printing
For the printing I took a number of different square sizes and base colours and used MOO's printfinity to produce 50 posters of different designs. We get free printing at MOO so was happy that it was low risk in terms of personal cost - fortunately everything came out as I wanted first time! Fun to turn digital into physical and was a cheap and easy way to decorate my shed with my own creations. It made me happy :).