For my first jab at the risograph printer I used p5.js to generate this image of a Barcode of the current Dow Jones Stock Market index with a text cut out of the question “What’s Your Price?”.
When we were first given the assignment I knew right away that I wanted to play around with the idea of a barcode. The next step was figuring out what I wanted to cut out. I thought a bit about what barcodes are for which is typically to mark the price of something. This gave me the idea of generating a text cutout with the question “Whats your price”. I also thought working with a text cutout should be simple enough for my first go at the riso and p5. I am new to coding so my first challenge was figuring out how to code an image of a barcode. The first problem I ran into was not having the skill to manipulate the code I found that generated a barcode using p5 so I decided to instead use an image of a barcode and extract the color layers (although I soon realized that since I was working with a black and white image this may not have been necessary at all). This problem actually ended up being great because it gave me the idea of generating a barcode image of the current Dow Jones stock market index which I think makes the print much more interesting.
After I created the barcode image of the Dow Jones I used the cutout function to cutout the text of my question. Since the image was black and white I wanted to make sure there was some green hue to it so I used a tint function to tint the image green. Although this had no impact on the print It gave me a general idea of what it could look like within the preview window. Overall i’m happy with my first print though I think I will work on dithering my images next time to give it more of that imperfect risograph feel.