First week of school for semester 2 was just me, wei ren, vikas. Doing a consultation, embarrassingly typing this and admitting that I did not bring much to the table for consultation. This whole december was just me purely finding a company and building my portfolio, CV, and on top of that I was studying how other people in the company that I want to work in, did their portfolio. Yea.. and I am still doing it. I also planned to use the same website as semester 1 for my CPJ cause I thought that it is better to place all my whole one year progress in one website and just decided to add a landing page for my CPJ so it can separate the semesters into 2.

So I decided to do my first task of this semester, but the thing is catching up from my previous semester, my exploration on text movement was pretty boring and I decided to continue experimenting but the thing is I always have this thought at the back of my mind that there are millions of ways on how I can make text move and what if I don’t know what to go down with? And I choose all the experiments I have test, how do I present it? But I did not think about that at first because I needed to start my brain for this semester and just do a couple of mini experiments.

I started with a sketch, and I decided to do this on p5js and I am not the greatest coder in p5js and I do not want to bothered Andreas 24/7 bombarding him with constant questions about coding so there are lie 70% of the time I am asking chatGPT to code for me the base code and I will start experimenting. Of course it is important for me to understand the code then I can start experimenting and exploring different options with the code. So this is my sketch for reflective type, how it goes is when user types, it appear on reflected on the other side, again I did this is because usually when we type, we are only looking at one thing which is the blinking text as we type but it has come to my attention that what if we have two and now that I think about it, I feel like it can come off as annoying so I decided to add a little more patterns into it, and when I say patterns I have immersive, fill with text patterns on the full canvas.

The reason why I thought of reflective text is because when you type, the letters appear where the blinking bar is. Reflective text changes that by giving you something unexpected to look at, breaking the usual habit. Instead of just staring at the same spot, reflective text makes you look around the screen. It adds a bit of variety and keeps the whole process of typing from feeling too robotic. I also just wanted to add some fun, sometimes typing can feel like such a boring, functional task. Reflective text brings in a playful twist, making the experience feel fresher and less like a chore. Normally, we’re so used to following that blinking cursor. Reflective text shakes up the way we visually process what we’re typing, making us more aware of the patterns we take for granted.

So this is the first prompt code, this is the code that makes the reflective text works

Chatgpt helped me on this but it is also my part to experiment with the code and also understand how the code works. So, the push() and pop() functions are used to manage the drawing settings. push() saves the current settings like transformations and colors, so any changes made within its block won’t affect the rest of the canvas. Once the mirrored text is drawn, pop() restores the original settings.

Now since I got the base code right, I decided to experiment more with this code

My first experiment with having this reflective experiment to have a pattern, so when user continues to type it creates a circle surrounding it so now I duplicate the code and created this

To be honest, the reason why I did this because I planned to project the idea I had previously during my december holidays but after coding this out and I had a talk with my friend, she gave me really good feedback, so this friend of mine was in a different atelier and I was just explaining to her about my plan for my final outcomes and I already have to know what I planned to present for Open Studio, not really a full proof plan but more of like I sort of know what I want to put on my table as during my semester 1, my table was empty as it was all digital so, I talked her, I decided to have a 100 pages (Im in week 16, reading this, laughing at I dreamt of doing 100 codes. LOL) of how text can be display on screen as you type, and probably a website on how my research went? And user testing with the apples idea where instead of using the screen as my prototype, I can use an object projecting my playful text onto an object, like instead of having my experiments on a screen, it will be on an object but the thing is my friend has, she doesn’t understand that part but she do think that the 100 pages thing makes sense as there are indeed a million ways on how my project can go, I can continue playing with type and experiment.

After our talk, I realized that it is really important to communicate my ideas through my project.. I know I mean there will be times I forget about it and can’t blame me, there are a thousand and one things going on in my mind when I think about my project so I decided to restart my idea, refreshing, I read back my dissertation and realized that my research objective felt flimsy and isn’t a strong reason, like I said, there are millions of ways to do my project, there are millions of ways for text to move so I had to really research about that and I was glad I had that talk with my friend and that she told me she didn’t really understand so I decided to write down my project on a piece of paper (lol I lost that paper) basically that paper was just me reflecting. I think there is a lot to do for week 2, I have to restart my research objective but I don't like the text wrap, text flow, all that stuff.