Art & code

ello! This personal web site is about my love of art and code which I have woven into my activities over the years.

I am using this site as much for sharing about my passion as for experimenting and playing with Web technology!

I enjoy creating with code and the animated drop-cap to the left is an example example of visual illusion (carefully look at the wireframes to realize it is not quite aligning with what your brain is trying to see) and uses code to create the various effects (in this case, SVG, CSS and JavaScript).

Anoter example is the stippled portrait above. It is created from a black and white image, processed in Prizma, then manipulated through the Stipplism plugin and finally the output result is the base for data used in WebGL code. Click on the graphic to see it animate (on the GPU).

On the coding side, I started my journey studying telecommunications. which gave me a taste for distributed computing, the art of coding, object oriented methodologies, and the principles at the foundation of today's cloud computing.

Over the years, I have enjoyed both immersing myself deep technical work and building and growing teams. I now lead product teams and love taking an idea from its seed stage to being a real, shipping product customers enjoy (like Adobe XD, my most recent effort).

On the the artistic side, visual arts have appealed to me from as far as I can remember. I admire renowned artists such as Modigliani and Picaso.

The story telling, graphical power and humanity of graphic novel artists like Didier Comes, André Franquin orJanry (Jean-Richard Geurts) also resonated with me from a young age, even more so.

To this day, I have a particular fondness for the "bande dessinée Franco-Belge" with the artists of the ligne claire (or École de Bruxelles) and the école de Marcinelle styles, of which Asterix and Obelix, Tintin and Spirou and Fantasio are prime examples.

I am fascinated by the way media (paint, computer programs, drawing) are able to create the illusion of reality by evoking it while of course never being the real thing. This is what Magritte's famous The Treachery of Images painting reminded the world of.

This site shares the many connections between these two passions and the bridges I have built between art and code over the years.

One of the main bridges is SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics. It is the web standard for describing vector graphics on the Web and is now widely supported on all web browsers.

SVG lends itself to all sorts of 2D graphics such as illustrations, graphs or art. Because SVG describes shapes, text and images as objects, SVG content can be rendered at high resolutions.

Since SVG is a web format, it can be manipulated by scripts, can be styled with CSS and can be fully integrated in web pages (as the example just above). It is a great playground for creative coding on the Web. Eric Dahlström and I created SVG Wow a few years ago to illustrate and promote SVG's wide potential.

I have decidated a major part of my carreer to SVG (implementations, standard) and advocated the advent of a more graphical web. I made many friends with the same passion along the way!

The portfolio page describes how I evolved on the creative side, starting to 'create with code', and then moving on to generative art and more recently, a focus on 2D rendering created from 3D tools (Cinema 4D), with the intention of creating polished creations inspired by traditional Japanese woodblock prints and the graphic artists mentioned above.

Please feel free to reach out with comments or questions.