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UAL Creative Computing Institute: Graduate Showcase

UAL Creative Computing Institute · with Conor Rigby and Josh Murr · 2020 · Design and development

Gatsby
React
GLSL

The showcase home page in a browser: the title Creative Computing Graduate Showcase in white pixelated type on blue, broken up by a dithered image the shader has dragged through the letters — The showcase home page.

The first graduate showcase for UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, then newly founded. I designed and built it with Conor Rigby and Josh Murr.

The site had to sit inside UAL’s identity, as a variant of the parent system rather than a departure. The layout stayed recognisably UAL. The changes were narrow: an adjusted palette, Suisse Int’l for headlines and body, and GT Pressura Mono only for the students’ names, the one place the institute’s subject entered the type.

The Figma file: colours, type styles and page mockups.

The hero was a fragment shader. The cursor dragged waves through the type, and when it stopped the surface returned to an idle animation of droplets. Displacement ran per pixel on the GPU, which kept it smooth full screen on the phones most visitors used.

The hero mid-drag: the white pixel type of the title torn apart by a dithered wave the cursor has pulled across the blue — The hero mid-drag.

The hero at rest: the title legible again, a single dithered ring of a droplet spreading beside it — The hero at rest.

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

Three phones showing the showcase: the pixelated landing title, the top of a project page for The Healing Orb, and a project page ending on the blue UAL Creative Computing Institute footer — The showcase on a phone.

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

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

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