Visually inspired by letterpress printing techniques and the limitations of traditional block-based systems, with their rule sets and built-in constraints, I set out to recreate something similar digitally.

That exploration evolved into building a custom JavaScript application, essentially an online tool and work environment for generating images like these. The tool allows for real variation. It includes functionality for uploading custom shapes, along with a range of arrangements, effects, and distortions that make it genuinely flexible and fun to use.

Technically, it’s built in p5.js and supports saving JSON files and SVGs, as well as uploading and storing variations in an online database I created to archive and organize the pieces worth keeping.

It’s now an ongoing, likely indefinite, work in progress, part design exploration, part coding practice, part creative tool building, and part AI collaboration. As I’ve shifted from building the tool to actively using it to create images, new possibilities keep emerging, which inevitably feed back into expanding the tool itself.

If you’d like to spend some time with it, check it out for yourself.