From the Archive: Structure de Quadrilatéres

From the Archive: Structure de Quadrilatéres

Back in May 2018, I attended OpenVisConf in Paris, and I took the opportunity to visit the "Artistes et Robots" exhibition at the Grand Palais. I saw a pen plotter artwork artwork by Vera Molnár there that really struck me, titled Structure de Quadrilatéres. This, interestingly, was long before I got interested in making pen plotter artwork myself.

Anyway, I wanted to improve my Javascript skills so I built a recreation of the artwork in an Observable notebook, using D3.js. The result is pretty good, I think.

More importantly, though, Observable's notebook format lets you read through my coding thought process - building it up from a single square to something that's interactive, generative and animated. I think it's a great way of teaching code and understanding someone else's work.

Check it out here:

Structure de Quadrilatéres
An Observable notebook by Duncan Geere.

Subsequently, some friends of mine at Craft Labs here in Gothenburg asked if they could use my Quadrilatéres on the label of a beer they’d brewed. The results looked pretty good: