All the handwriting stuff from the previous newsletters/weeks/months/years has always had two sides, the actual writing like normal writing part and the what-art-can-I-create-with-writing part.
The art side has generally focused on taking typesetting layout inspiration from magazines and newspapers, handwritten journals and repetition. Here’s an example from ‘xoxo’
Very regular and very ‘on the grid’, which I love, but I’ve also spent a good while tinkering with something more organic, and it’s never quite felt right - the vibes were off - until now.
As with a lot of things the system is fairly “simple” but starts to look more complex as you add layers. There are five stages to generating one of these designs.
The first stage “foundation” divides the page up into rows, anywhere from 3 to 24 and then draws horizontal and vertical lines in those rows, which have some very simple rules; horizontal ones try to stay parallel to each other, but are sometimes attracted or repelled to each other, vertical ones are curves. These form the “skeleton” of the design.
The second stage “grow” goes through a number of rounds, 1-6, that cause new lines to grow out of the foundation lines. These tend to jut out of the foundation lines, growing until they either hit something, or we complete the number of rounds.
The third stage is “break”, places some simple rectangles onto the design, distorts them with extreme perlin-noise randomness, and uses them to delete a whole bunch of lines. This puts a bit of negative space back in, without totally destroying the composition. The second panel below shows both the 2nd (green) and 3rd (yellow) stages together.
Quick note: the four images below with the debug info turned on, are four different designs, because I have to create a new one each time, which is why each stage looks different, sorry for any confusion.
The fourth stage “write” then writes the letters along the foundation and growth lines, plus some inside the distorted rectangles created in the “break” stage.
These letters can be random, random upper/lower-case, random numbers or symbols, or, from a provided set of letters. These ones happened to have randomly selected F, U, C & K, what are the chances 🤔🤷♂️
The fifth and final stage “decorate” places cables onto the design, picking clusters of letters (or just letters, if it runs out of clusters) to act as the cable start and end points.
And yes, all this code is written by hand because none of it is particularly complicated, and I’ve done all the individual parts separately many times before; work with what you already know.
The postcards work well, I’ve even tried some small accordion books, but I’m also looking forwards to making some much larger designs. I have a stack of beautiful St Cuthberts Mill Saunders Watetrford watercolour paper with deckled side edges that’s burning a hole in my draw and I’m dying to use.
The postcard sized ones I’ve sent out to friends have already been a hit.
Which is a kinda awkward segue into.
💌 💌 💌 💌 💌
# SHOP AND PATREON
On plots large and small.
I’m still slowly spinning up the shop, but if you want to get your hands on the very plot posted above, then it’s here: https://shop.revdancatt.com/shop/fuck-series-i-system-2 - and I’ll be adding more A3+ sized plots, both sweary and non-sweary over the coming weeks. [Side note: if you want a custom one with a specific word/name hit me up, I’m actually pretty excited to keep the ArtFrame running, so the more the merrier.]
Patreon on the other hand is like a monthly postcard mail club, last month was the DOOM project. During that I realised I was going to run out of index cards so I quickly cut up some old maps I had in a draw, which became some of my favorite out of the whole lot.
November is definitely going to involve some postcards both sweary and non-sweary from this new system and a stab at a small cute accordion book (more on that next newsletter).
Patreon doesn’t really want to you do this, but you can totally sign up for just one month, snag the postcards and then ditch.
And, I’ll try and get better at saying what’s coming up, because I’ve had a few people ask about these DOOM/Map postcards and I only plotted enough for the October Patreon members. So for cool experimental stuff that won’t end up in the shop for ages, if at all, Patreon is the place.
🏺 🏺 🏺 🏺 🏺
# POTTERY
I had more adventures in 3d clay printing land last week. Which I still insist is just pen plotting but you get to go upwards too. If you can write code to create SVGs or GCODE for a plotter to can throw in the Z-axis and make a pot.
Kris, who’s the resident sculptor in the studio is exploring making larger bodies, which means there’s always some left-over clay in the machine and the whole thing is easier to clean if it’s all used up.
When this happens I press the “MAKE AN AWESOME POT” button I added to my making awesome pots code. Spoiler; it doesn’t make awesome pots very often, there’s too much randomness, but it also doesn’t take much to press the button a lot of times, so it evens out in the end.
A kiln has just turned up too, so next step is to fire them and then glazes.
I still do not know what I’m doing.
# THE END & WORK AVAILABILITY
If you’ve read this far, thank you!
Last newsletter I said I’d been pretty stressed, that appears to be over now, yay! I got pretty much all the things I needed to get done for work done so that’s all ready to roll.
Which means, the rare situation of me being able to start a new (small to medium) project, or pick up some work is, well, here. This is a real thing that’s happened more than once: “Oh, there was this really interesting job but I just assumed you’d be too busy, you’re always doing stuff” which on the one hand is actually kinda true, but also, fuck!
I’ve learnt, and also suggest to other people, you/I need to be really blatantly obvious when availability comes up, and that is now! So if everything hasn’t been totally overrun with AI, and you have something weird enough drop me a line, particularly if it involve datasets!!
Okay, time to go, catch in for Newsletter #100 on Thursday 12th November 2026.
Love you all,
Dan
🧡