As you may or may not know, I’ve been dabbling in experimental animation since the late ’90s and I was once a Flash designer/developer. Since Steve Jobs — and hence the whole web industry — publicly rejected Flash in the ’10s I became adrift in the standards-friendly in my field of front end web design. Soon to be former Flash designers were often told they could create the same content with a combination of HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript libraries. My problem with that was that most visual artists like myself can’t simply replicate Flash content with those scripting languages, especially since most visual artists aren’t of a technical bent.

I didn’t give up on my passion for (interactive) animation for the web though. One day while I was living in Portland 9 years ago I was wandering through Powell’s City of Books bookstore, still the biggest bookstore in USA, and in the tech section I stumbled upon a damn interesting looking book about something called ‘Processing‘. It was within the JavaScript section and from what I roughly remember the book cover had an abstract, mathy visual pattern which reminded me of a Flash book I had on creative coding. I checked out other books near this Processing book and discovered at least one book on something called p5.js which seemed very similar. Soon I figured out that p5.js (p5, for short) is pretty much the same thing, only it’s a JavaScript library whereas Processing is Java-based. I quickly realized a great deal of potential with these coding languages for me, to create the kind of geeky yet artistic content that I’d been in the groove of creating before and I realized. I never went as far as I really wanted with Flash and I wanted to get back in that groove with something like these coding languages. Acknowledging this would be more challenging than Flash I chose to start with p5 instead of Processing since I already know JavaScript and had zero interest in learning Java, spreading myself thin at a time when I felt getting too general & broad with my skills could be a bad direction.