Hard Fork
(2022) ASCII Animation
Description
Cover Artwork for the New Yor Times Podcast Hard Fork.
Introducing ‘Hard Fork’
Hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore stories from the bleeding edge of tech.
What’s real? What’s hype? “Hard Fork” is here to help you make sense of it.
Client: The New York Times
Release: October 7, 2022
Hosts: Kevin Roose, Casey Newton
Art Direction / Design: Benjamin Tousley
Artwork: Julian Hespenheide, Custom software in Processing (ASCII Tool v.0.1)
Press release: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podcasts/hard-fork-technology.html
The ‚Hard Fork‘ is a still frame of a procedural line animation that splits into two forks. The design brief stated that the animation should depict a situation which resembles a Hard Fork:
noun / ‚härd ‚fork /
- A radical change to a computing protocol that makes all previous versions incompatible with the new protocol.
- A new podcast that explores stories from the wild frontier of tech and the future that’s already here.
A custom software written in Processing is generating the appropiate drawing canvas and fills it live with the colors, glyphs and animates the whole in a tack sharp and pixel perfect manner. The „still frame“ for the Cover artwork is therefore only a part of a bigger and looping animation, where each single character is moving. I’ll add some work-in-progress recordings at a later point.
