Happy Holidata

The holidays are upon us! 2016 has been a busy year here at Pitch, but we’ve been getting into the spirit of the season as we make our annual holiday cards.

This year’s card features a snowflake that uses two data points in its generation: how long we’ve known the recipient and the air quality where we’re sending the card. It is unique to the person we sent it to, and no two snowflakes are alike.

After getting some inspiration from dozens of photos of snowflakes, we brainstormed about the different types of symmetry and shapes that would make our design. We then generated the snowflake with a script that draws a certain number of radial spikes based on how long we’ve known the person we were sending them to. Other parameters for the generation rely on random numbers, ensuring that each generated snowflake was completely unique.

After plugging in our recipients’ data we exported the generated snowflakes to our Axidraw, a pen plotter that can draw complicated designs with any pen you put in it. Each snowflake took anywhere from 5-10 minutes to draw, depending on its complexity. The color we chose for the snowflake depended on the air quality where it would be sent to:

Our little axidraw robot did a good job of drawing all of the complicated snowflake line paths, and we even used it to draw the addresses on the envelopes and the message on the back of the card.

We love that we get to share our art and designs with our wonderful friends and clients. Thank you to you all and we wish you a very, very happy holidata!

You can see all of the snowflakes we made in this animated snowstorm. The source is available on github as well.