Going into this project I originally had no idea what I was going to do. With the previous projects it was easy to come up with ideas but when it came to typography I didn’t know how I was going to make it aesthetic. I could have done data visualization but I couldn’t think of any data or statistics that mattered to me. In any case, the first idea that came to mind was to first try and make a bouncing ball which goes across the screen, then to make it about typography I would have said ball go to a certain point on the screen to spell out a word. It was a simple idea but as you will see down the line I added a few small details to make it more appealing.
I began first with creating the bouncing circle as you can see below
For some reason it has decided to fall through the bottom of the screen, but I promise when I first made it it worked fine :). In doing this simple animation I learned a lot. I had taken a lot of inspiration from my previous assignment where I wanted to make circles that went around. In that previous assignment I wanted to use vectors originally but didn’t know how to. However, after showcasing it in class my professor as well as Pi explained to me how to use the vector to add a new position. It was done by adding the vectors x or y value to the x or y value of the circle. You can see this in more detail in the code below.
update() {
angleMode(DEGREES);
this.posX = this.posX + this.v0.x;
this.posY = this.posY + this.v0.y;
// theres a problem where when it hits the corner it decides to go in a straight line into the next corner. Not sure why this happens, I think its to do with the if statements, but its rare enough where debugging isn't worth it (at least by my standards).
// overarching if statement, if false then it goes into other if statements to see which part is false
if(!(this.posY < height && this.posY > 0 && this.posX > 0 && this.posX < width)) {
if(this.posX > 0 && this.posX < width) {
// top and bottom
if(this.posY < 0) {
// top reflect
print("reflect top");
this.v0 = p5.Vector.reflect(this.v0, this.upVector);
}
if(this.posY > height) {
//bottom reflect
print("reflect bot");
this.v0 = p5.Vector.reflect(this.v0, this.downVector);
}
} else {
// left and right
if(this.posX <= 0) {
// left reflect
print("reflect left");
this.v0 = p5.Vector.reflect(this.v0, this.leftVector);
}
if(this.posX >= width) {
// right reflect
print("reflect right");
this.v0 = p5.Vector.reflect(this.v0, this.rightVector);
}
}
}
// noise for the heading
}
The specific line where I do the adding of the vectors x and y component is at the top. Afterwards I made a lot of if statements and created some other vectors from which the object could reflect off. The reason I did this with vectors again was because there was a method that already existed which I could use instead of doing math. By the time I had gotten all of this to work I was very happy with how it turned out. You’ll see with the bottom comment that I at one point was going to add noise to make the direction slightly random, but it didn’t work out unfortunately. I may work on this for the next assignment just as I worked on vectors for this assignment.
Then after that, I made another sketch. The plan for this other sketch was to just make the points surrounding text. Up to this point I had only ever done it once in class and that wasn’t enough for me to really understand how it works.
Its a very basic sketch, and that was kind of the point. It took me a while to make it and that was mainly because I was trying to center it. The way I did it was by subtracting half of the width of the text to the x position of the text since by default it’s drawn from the bottom left of the text (as far as I know, it may be top left but it doesn’t matter for centering). The problem was getting the width, for some reason textWidth() wasn’t working so I had to use the textBounds() function which is part of the font class which already comes with p5js. After all that I was finally ready to make the final project.
Also I should mention, my original plan was to make the text in arabic but I saw a stack-overflow post which said p5js isn’t great at doing right to left text and so I decided not to in order to save time.
By this point, my plan was that I would have all of these bouncing circles, one for each point in the text and then when the user holds down a button each button would return to it’s appropriate point on the text. Because I had done a lot of work before this working on separate features I was struggling with I could bring it all together and in theory it would mean that I wouldn’t have to spend as much time. I put the text sketch into a function, and since I had made the bouncing circle in a class I copied that too. In hindsight, I could have made the bouncing circle its own class to see how that would work and to learn a bit more but I, again, my try to do that for the next assignment.
Below is the finished product (press left click)
The text can be changed