Postcards, colour, 2021

Overview

Orientation defines story in a pair of digital mosaics.

Background

The idea for this was originally an interactive HTML piece, where the text would change depending on the shape of the browser window or the orientation of the phone/tablet. That proved too much for my rudimentary coding skills and was thrown away into a dark folder on an old hard drive. Later, it occurred to me that it would be better as pieces of paper and that led to the postcards you see now.

The intersection of pixel art, mosaic and monospace typography seemed to be a pretty straightforward one. I could just take a picture, reduce the resolution, slap a fixed-width font on top of that and wait for those sweet postcard bucks to come rolling in.

I sourced two pieces of art from the same artist, Jean-Pierre Renoir. The Portrait of Alfred Sisley and The Bay of Algiers seemed to scale well, in that they were still identifiable as a portrait and landscape when scaled down to a resolution of 37 x 44 pixels. The aspect ratios of the paintings didn’t quite match the target page size, so I had to fill in some bits of background and crop others.

The tiles are a customised version of the ‘scrabble squares’ in the Apple Symbol font. I used Font Forge to hack together a version that corresponded to their actual letters. Font Forge is a pretty frustrating piece of software to use. I’m sure it’s very powerful, but it has that inscrutable, in-depth technical sheen that a lot of open-source applications use to scare off users.

With that done, I wrote several versions of the short stories on the cards. Obviously, one was going to be about a person and the other was about a place, but it took a couple of drafts to get the right tone.

As with a lot of my pieces, writing and design process go hand-in-hand, but pull in different directions. The needs of the story are often constrained by the physical space that contains it. I don’t know if this is making me better or worse as a writer, but I find it’s an interesting way to work. It’s not so much “what’s good” as “what fits”.

Like a lot simple ideas, this one proved to be really fiddly. Trying to work out correlations of pixels to points and getting the colours balanced so they would be both readable and recognisable was a bit of a pig. It’s worth mentioning that Affinity’s ability to swap instantly between Publisher, Designer and Photo toolsets was a really handy. It’s one of the things I like most about it (as well as not having to pay a monthly fee).

Printing was outsourced to Print24, who are pretty good - fast and well priced, although they do send a ridiculous amount of emails about delivery. Most importantly, their postcards seem like they would stand up to the rigours of the postal system.