Refaceting Garnet
During the pandemic, I first learned about creative coding through a Generative Typography workshop led by Lynne Yun. It reminded me that computing could be expressive. Tools like Var Type and Space Type Generator were vignettes of interaction with knobs that enabled seemingly infinite variations.
Garnet was born of this mindset. I wanted to find ways to play around with interaction design where each page offered something new. During that year+ of lockdown I spent a lot of time building, extending, and designing scenes. Some are more developed than others but this was my first big creative coding practice. It was an escape during the turbulent time.
So when it broke about a year ago, I was shattered. The underlying framework had released a new version with breaking changes and upgrading this and all of its other outdated dependencies would take hours of trial and error. So I put it off and procrastinated. I started new projects and have used creative coding to dig deeper into the worlds of art and design tool making. Garnet had become legacy code and I had made my peace with it.
Until a few weeks ago, thanks to Claude, I was able to spend an afternoon modernizing the codebase and rewriting the functionality. A few hours and ~5,000 lines of code later, I had it up and running again. It feels odd to see my old sketchbook again after so long. There are so many areas of improvement, half-finished ideas to delete, new ideas to start. But for now I'm content with it being visitable again. Have fun on the playground!
-Mello