Code Paper Pattern - with Maurice Meilleur

Code Paper Pattern: a workshop

Date: 03/22/2025

Time: 1:00PM - 4:30PM (30min break in the middle)

Location: Letra Muerta Inc - 113 S 6th St, 202A

In this workshop, we will create tools and patterns with code, and have a paper outcome. Useful for pattern construction for textiles, book covers, web, applications in branding, or personal projects.

Three basic ideas will be taught, central to coding: variables, step-and-repeat loops, and conditional (if-then) statements. We’ll create adjustable patterns to make paper-folded textures and fields of shapes you can print or save as raster or vector graphic files, and to make a colored papercraft solid.
No coding experience is necessary!

As creatives, we use lots of tools to make our work. But we don’t often consider how our tools can sometimes condition us into certain processes and solutions. Creating your own tools can make it easier to produce the work you really want to make, and writing code can be a great way to do that. Some of the best visual ideas come about by setting up some parameters—a color palette, a shape or two—and letting the system run to see what happens. Computers (and humans) love repetition and can quickly make many variations on a theme. And sometimes ‘mistakes’ in the code produce outcomes even better than what you originally wanted.
We’ll be writing code in Python—a very accessible coding language for beginners—using the free application DrawBot. You’ll need a laptop running MacOS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later, your sketchbook and pens/pencils, and—if you have them—scissors and bone folders (we’ll have some of each to share). Color printing and paper will be provided.

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Maurice Meilleur is a recovering political theorist turned graphic designer and design researcher and writer. He completed a PhD in political theory from Indiana University Bloomington in 2004, and earned his MFA in graphic design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. He’s an assistant professor of graphic design at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, where he teaches and studies typography and generative design, and design ethics and theory. He has contributed numerous type and book reviews to Typographica and Fonts in Use. He’s writing a book on Jurriaan Schrofer’s constructed scripts, and he’s presented his research at Robothon, ATypI, TypeCon, the Cooper Union, the Letterform Archive, and Automatic. Maurice explores digital drawing and animation using Python and Drawbot as part of a larger investigation into typographic representation and algorithmically-defined formal systems.

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If you want to take the workshop and don't have a Mac laptop, we have extra ones we can lend to some participants. If you need financial assistance, shoot us an email.

Host or Publisher Letra Muerta Inc