Creativity and Motivation
Every new year, Cracked.com posts a new version of this article (NSFW), and I always read it. While I don't consider myself a slacker by any stretch of the imagination, there are some things I wish I was doing. I find programming, whether it's back-end or front-end, to be a creative and fulfilling endeavor, however I always tend to really look up to and somewhat envy the creative coders. It would be amazing to do something like go to Gray Area, but that's off the table because:
- It's in San Francisco and I'm married with two kids and live in New Mexico
- It costs 3k and I already learned much of that during my Master's Degree program at NMHU (It was a blast, btw.)
So what's left for me to do? Rather than sitting around pining about how I wish I was doing some creative coding, I should actually just do it. In case the Cracked article was TL;DR or you're not in a position to be reading an obscenity laced article about self-improvement right now, that was my main take-away.
Anyway, I'm kind of at a break in my main paid project right now, so I wanted to spend some time just messing around with various creative coding pursuits. I've decided to focus on Javascript for them even though I know it isn't the most powerful language for creative coding. Here's why:
- I'm using a crappy Lenovo Yoga laptop and I cannot run Processing on it because I CANNOT SEE THE INTERFACE AND IT MAKES ME SO MAD.
- Interactivity and Distribution - I want to be able to share what I made because it matters to me that what I do is interactive. I don't want to be the only one who saw what I did.
- FRAMEWORKS. As of yesterday, Javascript has about 45 billion different frameworks and libraries. I would like to explore what they're capable of. One that I have been meaning to play with for some time now is D3.js.
I would like to begin by just making little fun dabbling projects. The first of those was the Zero Percent Off project I posted a week ago. I'm working on a couple others that are inspired by the Dr. Seuss books I read my children and the amazing array of artworks that The Met has just released into the public domain. That's where I got the awesome griffin (I guess?) tapestry image that I am using for this blog post.