Particles and Conferences!

Particles are dominating my summer! Not only is the GalaxyGoo book Particle out, but later this summer I'll be speaking about particles at FITC San Francisco. I may even bring some copies of Particle to give away at my session.

GalaxyGoo's Particle...It's here!

GalaxyGoo's Particle...It's here!
Originally uploaded by galaxygoo1


KristinPages
Originally uploaded by galaxygoo1

Particle, the book, is here!

GalaxyGoo's organized and hosted flashathons for years, but this is the first time we've produced a book from it. And it's beautiful!

The art in the book was created with ActionScript, and captured from dynamic Flash animations.

While working on this project, I learned an awful lot about book editing and producing, and now have an all new respect for folks who do this all the time.

The whole project grew organically. Starting out, there wasn't a set format, or list of requirements for each artist. Since all of the artists were donating their art, I didn't want to put too many demands on them. And I wanted to make their participation as flexible as I could.

At first, I thought we'd just have one image from each artist. But I was having a hard time choosing which ones should go in. Some artists sent in one image, and others sent many. All of them beautiful, and impossible to leave out, of course. So, I played around with the layouts and settled on using three thumbnails next to the artist's statement on pages where I had multiple images to choose from.

My own pages were a lot of fun to make. I usually develop for screen, and print isn't a realm I've spent much time in. But I had so much fun running my code, and capturing stills from it. I ended up with way too many images to go into the book. I loved them all, and picking just a few was difficult.

I also included several pages of works from past flashathons. Particles came up over and over again, and it seemed natural to include a selection of them. I grouped them in loose themes: "Drift", "Growth", "Grid", and "Life". There wasn't really room to explain them, but if you look up the dynamic versions, the groupings should make some sense. The main purpose was to share a bit of the project's history.

Already, there's been talk of doing another one. If we do, the theme will most likely be "fractals". But since this is a benefit project, to support GalaxyGoo's educational projects, we'll only do it if this first book does well. I hope it does, because I had a lot of fun with it, and I'd like to do it again.

I think it's the coolest "thank you" gift we've ever had, for GalaxyGoo supporters. By the way, all profits from book sales will be donated to GalaxyGoo (a non-profit dedicated to increasing science literacy).

Buy the book: Particle: A GalaxyGoo Project, Exploring Art and Code

GalaxyGoo project page: Particle

Huge thanks go to the project's sponsor: Influxis.