UAL Creative Computing Institute — Graduate Showcase

The first graduate showcase for the Creative Computing Institute, then newly established at University of the Arts London.

UAL has an institutional identity and the site had to sit inside it — a variant of the parent system rather than a departure from it. The structure and layout stayed conventional and recognisably UAL. The deviations were narrow and deliberate: an adjusted palette, Suisse Int’l across headlines and body, and GT Pressura Mono reserved for the students’ names. A mono face marked the one place where the subject of the institute entered the typography.

The hero was a fragment shader. The cursor dragged waves through the typography and deformed it; when the pointer stopped, the surface resumed an idle animation of droplets. Displacement ran per pixel on the GPU, which is what made it viable full screen on a phone — the devices most likely to open a graduate showcase are the ones least able to afford the effect.

Everything else was static. Gatsby prerendered every student page at build time, so the shader was the only thing running at all.

Design and creative concept: Conor Rigby, Moritz Salla, Josh Murr. Web and shader development: Moritz Salla and Josh Murr. Documented at Fonts In Use.

The site is gone. One of the projects on it was mine.