Adobe x Still Kickin — Round 1

Helping Humans

Still Kickin is a Minnesota-based non-profit that helps amazing people who are going through horrible things. It was started in July of 2015 by Nora McInerny Purmort, who was inspired by the outpouring of support that she and her late-husband Aaron received during his brain cancer treatment. Each month, a new hero is chosen, and that person receives all of the proceeds from sales in Still Kickin’s online shop, as well as the donation-based events they host around the country.

Helping Still Kickin

Aaron was a designer, and he loved making posters. In an attempt to honor one of our own, myself and 5 other Adobe designers will be making posters for Still Kickin — one per month, starting in September. I’m honored to be first up.

The Goal

I knew I wanted to create a piece that has meaning on multiple levels, which meant that the elements that were present needed to be informed by something. My own career path has provided me with skills in both design and development, and I wanted to find a way to marry those two disciplines.

The Concept

Still Kickin celebrated their first anniversary on July 25th, 2016, which was fortuitous given the timing of this project. A lot can happen in a year, especially in the digital world, and I thought it would be fun to try to represent a slice of that. While exploring Still Kickin’s social media properties, I began to coalesce around the idea that involving people who support Still Kickin would be a fitting goal.

With a few days left until the 1 year anniversary, I decided to target Instagram as a potential source of data. Still Kickin had a little over 3,000 followers at the time, which seemed like a reasonable number to try to represent, given the larger size of the poster. My initial plan was to use Instagram’s API to retrieve a list of followers, but after going through the process of getting an API key and learning their endpoints, I realized that getting access to actual (non-sandbox) data involved having your application submitted and approved, and there wasn’t enough time left for me to rely on that process.

When in doubt, brute force!

Because I had Still Kickin’s Instagram credentials, I was able to log in and view followers in a modal window. That UI lists 10 followers at a time, and scrolling to the bottom loads 10 more. On the evening of the anniversary, Still Kickin had 3,150 followers, so 314 scrolls (!) later, I had the entire list loaded into the browser. I now had a DOM node with each user inside:

A few weeks prior, I had asked Nora to send me her favorite picture of Aaron. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would put it to use, but I knew that it would have meaning, and that was enough. The photo she sent me ended up being used to form a palette of four very different colors:

The Exploration

I’ve been a fan of generative art since I was a child, thanks to early exposure to computers in the mid 80’s. My creative process has always naturally benefited from constraints — they help me reduce mental noise, surface things that are important, and be resourceful. My design job at Adobe is full of constraints (technical limitations, user expectations, platform dependencies, etc) and I love that aspect of it.

Once I had some constraints (data and colors) to work within, I began to experiment with scripting Adobe Illustrator. Many of Illustrator’s tools are scriptable, and being able to work in a native vector format meant that I could create something that would be easier (in theory) to print.

I wanted to create something that honored the process that Still Kickin has been catalyzing: thousands of people from all over the planet, coming together to support and rally around an unfortunate circumstance.

Representing 3,150 data points in a single composition was more challenging than I had anticipated, especially in the context of making something that a person might want to put on their wall.

I ended up iterating over a few different directions…

… and finally settled on something that was originally inspired by the classic Spirograph set, and involved simulating the creation of a hypotrochoid and then measuring the x and y positions of the “pen” at regular intervals — 3,150 of them to be exact!

The Execution

So, after all of the experimentation and exploration, here’s the final result:

It contains over 50,000 vector objects, and is so complex that it is apparently incompatible with the PDF format. Here are some of the elements in detail:

Each line segment represents a single Instagram follower, with thickness determined by the length of that follower’s username.

Colors were randomly chosen from a four hue palette that was derived from a single source photo. The opacity of each fill was adjusted randomly between 0 and 100 to add depth and mute the overall composition.

The outside of the hypotrochoid element contains skylines of each city that Still Kickin hosted events in during their first year.

The background contains tendrils that represent individual Instagram followers (part of one of the initial explorations), with thickness determined (again) by username length.

A limited run of 400 posters were printed at Catapult on 80# Cougar Smooth Cover, with the Still Kickin wordmark being rendered via letterpress in a clear gloss foil on each piece:

They’ll be available at Still Kickin’s online shop on September 1st, 2016.