graphic designing in code

I sometimes fumble with the graphics designer's usual arsenal of tools (even with humble "Acorn" as my default image editor) and find it easier to switch to Processing or P5 for some graphical tasks. It's not as flexible as if I were fluent with Illustrator or Sketch, but often I get great flexibility with future variation.

So I was having a tough time making my vision for a poster understood ("the map of Fenway, with a guitar silhouette, outside the silhouette it's a photonegative and inside it's normal") and went to make up an example - p5 has a pretty decent "mask" function for images that says "use the alpha channel of the mask image as the alpha channel for this image (though the example in the documentation is confusing)

I grabbed a free guitar silhouette, used Acorn's Instant Alpha to make a negative and positive cutout... couldn't find Acorn's photo negative filter so I used LunaPic, an interesting little online editor... got the negative and positive, and the whipped together an online p5 program guitarmask.

Also, lifehack: sometimes it's so much easier to have a person be the go-between for projects - like that I Have People Skills guy has a point! I commissioned a coworker Katie whose current draft for the poster looks like this:

And when I offered to have her be in the email thread with the Fenway folks, she wisely backed out, and mentioned it's relaxing to have me as a go between. Similarly, for Arlington Porchfest, I might be consulting in terms of helping them build a version of their map site that won't crash during the event, but another person is taking the main responsibility for dealing with their committee folks...