Bigman R&D – Truchet
Awesome algorithmic artwork
The tangram
The tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle where the objective is to arrange 7 geometric shapes to form a specific image such as a bird or a tree. It was brought to the west in the 19th century and became a fashionable overnight sensation.
Bigman brand identity
At Bigman we solve puzzles every day and we love elegant and bold designs. The tangram combines both of these, so we thought it would be the perfect branding device for our own visual identity. After a few years of producing tangram art by hand, we decided it would be great if we were able to generate these artworks automatically.
Get your geek on
We coded a custom computer program, that we named Truchet, that was capable of producing one of a kind tangram grids of any size.
Coloured grids
We got Truchet to a basic level where it was capable of generating randomly coloured patterns that fitted perfectly together. To gain more control over what we were creating we set rules that would generate any colour scheme we liked but still letting the computer do all the hard work. This meant we were able to match specific colour ways from corporate identities or choose harmonious colours automatically using scientific colour theory. We were pretty happy with what we had created.
The King
Just when we were feeling pretty content we hit upon the idea of using photographs to set the colours of our tangram images, and our new style was born.
Branded images
We now have the perfect way to quickly and consistently brand images as uniquely ‘Bigman’. We can feed in abstract images for more decorative designs or use photography to create distinctively styled images.
Generative art
Because this is all generated by a computer in the blink of an eye we are free to very quickly play with the size of the pieces. We can make images more recognisable and realistic or bolder and more abstract, depending on our taste.
The sky is the limit
Bigman has the capability to use code to create any similar type of montage imagery. We could just as easily create an image of your product out of thousands of logos or make a Justin Bieber out of fruit!
Beyond Photoshop
The artistic filters already available on Photoshop are extremely over used and can restrict what you are able to produce. Generative art is an emerging field and the unique and stylised artwork it creates really stands out from the crowd. We encourage you to dream up your own ideas to get the most out of your images, and with our coding abilities there is no limit.
