A Small Note About Creative Coding

What is this about?

Creative coding is programming mainly done for “expression” rather than “function.” It is art of any form made through code. In simple terms, it programming to create art.

Where can I find art made through code?

There’s a lot of amazing artworks out there made by programming. One particular personality that stands out when it comes to this topic would be @beesandbombs. As you will see, oftentimes their work has patterns that are recursive, repeating, and is inspired from the natural world.

Our natural world is filled with patterns. Patterns that can be described through maths and logic. Maths and logic is a part of programming. They’re all connected. So, creative coding projects use concepts of the natural world. These concepts are then expressed mathematically and is virtually replicated.

Where do I begin?

So if ever this is a thing that you feel you might be into, I would recommend a fun instructor or teacher to learn from. That, for me, is Daniel Shiffman. He has a YouTube channel called The Coding Train.

I learned quite a lot by simply following along on some of his videos. Even though creative coding is not my thing, I had an amazing time applying concepts drawn from nature through code.

My personal experience on creative coding

Well, back in high school, I’d actually spend time just watching videos of Daniel Shiffman teaching all the different concepts. The series was called “Nature of Code” if I’m not mistaken. I’d watch them and then follow along. I try to at least optimize the programs he writes or follow better practices. He uses Processing and P5.js for creative coding. Those two are basically the same thing, one is run as a Java applet, and the other is on the web browser. Their APIs are made to be extremely similar and simplistic as much as possible. Both tools are quite beginner-friendly as it allows one to simply focus on the visuals they want to make without worrying how graphics work in-depth or under-the-hood. Honestly, if you’re a decent programmer where you at least got the basics down, you could jump to creative coding right away. The only thing that may be daunting is the fact that creative coding tends to lean on the mathematical side as well more so than the logic side of things.