Riviera Blog

Last night I came across the famous Vertigo poster by Saul Bass, which I really like. And it got into my head to figure out how the spiral was done. A couple of hours later I had something that wasn’t too far from it:

I’m posting the code here (I’ve used Processing). Maybe someone will find a great use for it! I’m not allowed to post the font, though. You’ll have to get it yourself at typographica.org.

If you’re just curious about how the spiral is drawn, it’s simply an ellipse that is rotated and shrunk at each step. The rotation and shrinking steps decrease asymptotically towards the central ellipse. I’d be quite interested to know how Bass did it.

[tags]graphics, processing, hitchcock, design, geometry, saul bass, vertigo[/tags]

This is purely for the benefit of people who may be googling for this piece of information, as I have been for the last 2 hours with great frustration. You’d think uploading a GPX file to the unit is simple and is just a matter of mounting the unit’s SD card and copy your file where the others GPX files are. Wrong. Grrr.

Here’s how I did it: download LoadMyTracks, plug your unit, but do *not* mount the card, then press “Send…” and select your GPX file.

[tags]gpx, gps, garmin, max, osx[/tags]