Repponen

Special edition of the German newspaper Die Welt that came out on October 6, 2011. The paper collaborated with the amazing Ellsworth Kelly, who replaced all the photographs throughout the newspaper with his artworks.

Play Pong right in your doc by Neil Sardesai

According to the author, who refers to Apple’s documentation, this is actually possible, and he built it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a working version to test it myself.

PNG layers

by Hassan Rahim

Single-purpose device

by Zongze Chen

Few days ago FFFFinder was 5th in the US AppStore in Photo & Video category.

Meanwhile V 1.1.0 is out now.

First time I vibe coded an app that produces results I can’t imagine in my head 🤯

Last night I realized I had an expiring banked reset in Codex that I needed to burn before it disappeared. I have a list of crazy things I want to do for occasions like that.

I have a long-running research folder on slit-scan photography that I’ve been collecting since I started working on the Time Stretched series back in 2021. It has articles, lots of YouTube videos on the topic, and image and video examples.

On a technical level, the basic principle is pretty simple if you understand how slit photography works with film cameras. Once you start emulating it digitally, you can use video as the source and things become much more interesting. For example, you can create time displacement, where different fragments of the image are sampled from video frames at different moments in time. You kind kind of do it in AE and Touch Designer if you know how to write expressions.

I fed all my research to Claude (free account) and asked it to prepare a technical brief for Codex to build an app that lets me do simple things like static slit photos from a video source, as well as time displacement videos.

The part I wanted to push much further was the slit itself. Instead of keeping it fixed (as ALL software does) or simply moving it across the image, I can animate the pixel-sampling path, rotate it, control its speed and apply sine waves to its movement. It samples pixels from the source as it moves, producing results that are completely unpredictable. The moment you combine this movement with time displacement, things get crazy.

There’s this concentration of hand-painted mural ads in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, around Kent Ave and Wythe. They’ve been there for as long as I’ve lived in Brooklyn, and it’s usually fashion or luxury brands. Basically, people paint these by hand with brushes, based on a provided image.

Now Figma, trying to be cool, has one massive mural painted by hand. I feel bad for the people trying to paint “Liquid Glass” and the Inter typeface.

To me, all of this feels quite sad.

My design idea from 2019. "Bath Outlet". How convenient that would be!

Time Stretched No. 53 🚧🚏🚸

If you didn’t screenshot it, it never happened.

[ https://x.com/ShaunakD07/status/2092984986551058574?s=20]

Not sure I had ever heard of https://www.peterhalley.com/, an American artist born in New York in 1953, until I came across his old monograph at the Strand.

I actually liked some of his work! But the book itself was so overdesigned and had this entire 2000s vibe, with text all over the place and weird rectangles, that I decided not to buy it. It was published exactly in 2000, so I should not be surprised.

But one thing was absolutely amazing. All the way at the end, there are multiple spreads that document, in a visual infographic way, exactly which artwork affected the next one. They branch into multiple paths but are organized as a timeline. I have never seen such a clear representation from any other artist. I spent way more time studying this “index” at the end than looking at the rest of the book.

Less than a month ago, I published a story, https://index.repponen.com/p/i-dont-see-faces about how designers tend to avoid any resemblance to a human face in both graphic and product design. Naturally, the next step felt obvious, AI products would start adopting avatars, mascots and characters, not just as random symbols, but as something integrated directly into the interface.

Since then, in just the past three weeks, Grok has been pushing further into character-based interfaces, with AI represented through cute animated characters. Jack Dorsey, the original Twitter founder and someone who seems to release a random new product every other month, launched https://berd.xyz/, where AI agents are represented by rather creepy-looking characters.

Today I came across an https://avatars.bible-strong.app/ for creating a character and defining how it expresses different emotions. It was made by front-end developer https://x.com/_smontlouis, who also builds Bible apps, which explains why the URL for this character thing is incredibly confusing.

And a quick website explaining the app.

https://layerloops.com/

☝️I completely reworked my LayerLoops app from scratch. The app lets you draw and record video loops inside your drawings.

New UI, new export pipeline, and some new features. Currently in testing on TestFlight.

Once completed, it will be available on the App Store.

🍏 What's new in EMA

• YouTube objects on canvas
• Custom file extension .ema for projects
• Updated dark theme
• Select multiple objects and ask AI
• Stable groups

I keep using EMA on a daily basis to keep track of some of the projects I do.

New York this week.

https://www.taniablanco.com/Sleepdrunk-Vademecum-8-13 (2008–2013) by Tania Blanco. A series of paintings that explore the overlap between nature, science and human-made things.

Man shows eclipse to his fish

[ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1bz6cet/man_shows_eclipse_to_his_fish/]

Wall-mounted reliefs by https://www.instagram.com/justinadian/ (b 1976, Texas). Stretched oil enamel or spray painted canvas around foam cushions.

Came across this gem on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/waythingsworki02cvan/mode/2up published in 1971. An illustrated technical encyclopedia that explains everything from how screws are cut and planes fly to how propulsion engines work, how ships are stabilized, and even how electronic music works.

One thing I notice more and more is how tightly text used to be set. In most books today and especially on digital screens, we are used to much more generous line spacing, often 1.5x or even more. Being exposed to this everywhere, we now associate that extra space with good readability. Looking back at older books, the much tighter setting can suddenly feel dense and harder to focus on, even though it was completely normal at the time.

Ok, this is actually interesting. Google is either trying to “rethink” the mouse cursor, or just looking for one more places to slap AI onto something.

Privacy concerns aside (it does look sketchy) I can see this being genuinely useful. I can think of many interesting applications for it.

What I do not understand is how Google’s design team always lands on the same examples: cooking recipes, booking restaurants or flights. Based on most AI presentations, it really seems like humanity does nothing but cook and fly.

[ https://deepmind.google/blog/ai-pointer/]

https://aino.agency/, a digital studio based between Oslo and Gothenburg, updated their site. Love the vibe. Fun, fast, memorable, and a really nice, polished use of ASCII to render visuals.

I was looking for a way to delete a playlist in Spotify. Instead, I found a way to play Snake with tracks from that playlist.

People of Bangkok this week 🌸

There used to be a VanMoof store in Brooklyn a couple of blocks from where I live, and I always noticed these boxes.

Apparently, when VanMoof, the Dutch e-bike manufacturer, started shipping bikes to the US, a lot of them were arriving damaged. Printing words like “FRAGILE” on the box did not seem to help much.

So they came up with a simple idea. VanMoof started printing a large flat-screen TV on the shipping box, hoping it would make handlers treat it with more care. According to VanMoof, the rate of shipping damage dropped by 70 to 80 percent after the redesign.

A good example of how one idea, and a bit of vector graphics, can save a company a lot of money.

P.S. The company did declare bankruptcy in 2023, reportedly due in part to high operating costs.

[ https://www.vanmoof.com/blog/en/tv-bike-box?srsltid=AfmBOoriRRWu7BqqKd8mPHmE9ynKULqZ8ru2ynpmdn2ZEL5yzw1BlL8E]

I had no idea Lightroom could create full-on masks based just on color range. I always had to mask areas out by hand, which takes time. I use Color Mixer all the time, but adjusting a color affects all shades and tints of that color across the entire image. This is much faster.

In this image, I wanted to remove the green reflection from the roof on the white surfaces, without touching any other green areas. I love discovering features that have been in the software since 2018 and suddenly wondering how I ever lived without them.

Time Stretched No.59

Form & Field 🚧

8(A) TKO. 2023
8(B) NYC. 2009