I’ve been developing this little software application in Processing for creating letterforms and doodles for future versions of the “Scriptor” (here and here) series of digital projections. In fact, I’m moving the whole project from Actionscript to Processing, if for no other reason than that Processing was invented by one of my peers at UCLA, Casey Reas, along with Ben Fry. Processing is also built on Java, which I’m guessing runs a little bit faster than Actionscript, but of this I can’t be sure.

In any case, working in Processing has been great; Reas and Fry really honed in on the types of functionality that would be part of the toolbox of any digital artist, integrating these functions into the relatively simple, nonetheless object-oriented, language to make it quite easy to achieve them — for example, ripping text from the web, or modifying video images in real-time.

http://www.arras.net/processing_test/LetterBuilder/applet/

I’ll have more to report on this later. For now, click through and goof around in there. There is no way to save your doodles as of yet, and there are a few bugs (mostly to do with the scroll bars) that I’m working out. You can more or less learn how to use it by looking at the buttons and reading the text there.