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December is gift-giving time, and if you’re not very organized indeed, late November/early December threatens to be characterized not by a pleasant anticipation of quality-time-to-come and a much-needed respite from work and research, but instead by a certain existential dread, or at least a rather more ontic version, most often directed at visions of the mall parking lot.

Being the vigilant (and vigilante) designers we are, Design less better organized in November under the auspices of creating some generative art for the holidays. We especially liked Jer Thorp’s idea of using letterforms as elements in a snowflake, but we wanted to personalize the results. In what even now we have to admit was a brilliant intuitive leap, we thought, “why not use the names of our loved ones? Then we can give them to our loved ones instead of going to the mall.”

Once we knew we were making these as gifts, we decided we would digitally fabricate ornaments from our designs. This threw a structural requirement on top of the aesthetic one, but, remembering the mall, we plunged bravely forward.

A detail from a generated snowflake.

Check it out for yourself or continue reading for…

Some ideas for your snowflake

So you’ve typed the names of your family, friends, co-workers, favorite baseball team, or whoever else into the snowflake generator, at which point you immediately realized that an email probably doesn’t constitute a gift in the traditional sense, and you’re ready to take it to the next level. Here’s some ideas we had to help you with that:

Images (Really easy)

Take a screen capture (Shift, PrtScn) and paste the image into your favorite program. Some suggestions:

• Make Christmas cards.
• Make a “family tree” with snowflakes for everyone in your extended family. Print it out and bring it to decorate your holiday party.

Masks/Vectors (Still pretty easy)

You can use the mask mode (press 3 on your keyboard) to output silhouette of the snowflake. This is useful for making masks or stamps/brushes in photo editing software like Photoshop.

We made a Christmas card!

It is also possible to use the Paths > Work Path tool in Photoshop to take the edges of the snowflake and turn them into a vector version.

This works, but if you need a more precise solution:

1. Download the code and run it in Processing.
2. Flip the PDF booleans on line 33 and 34 to “true”. The program will now output PDFs in the code directory.
3. Then, when you open the PDF in Illustrator, everything will come in as vectors.
4. From here, you can scale it to any size you like and the lines will still be crisp.
5. Now you can print your snowflakes on everything from gift tags all the way up to banners!

Export to other Formats (Difficulty varies from “Unbelievably, still pretty easy” to “Claes Oldenburg”)

There are all kinds of things you can do besides print out an image of your snowflake.

You can:

• make a 3d model or an animation
• a stencil for painting
• a fabric pattern
• cut out stickers using a vinyl cutter, or…
• (our favorite) make an ornament with a laser cutter

For these kinds of projects, you will probably need to generate shapes in different file formats. Luckily, the process is fairly straightforward.

We took a DXF export and used a
laser cutter to make this acrylic ornament.

1. Start with a PDF of your design. Open it in Illustrator.
2. Select everything and choose Type > Create Outlines. If you want the keep the separate letters, skip to step 6. Otherwise, to make a solid cutout, continue on.
3. Pick the snowflake, select Object > Ungroup, and delete the white border/frame around the snowflake.
4. Now, if you are sure all you have left are the letterforms, select them all, go to the Pathfinder window and apply Add to Shape Area (Boolean Add).
5. Next, click Expand in the Pathfinder. Your snowflake should be one connected solid now.
6. At this point, the next step is up to you. You can export your newly-solid shape to common formats like DWG or DXF using File > Export. From here you should be able to open it in the program you need.

Words of thanks and our pink Christmas tree

This project was inspired by some other winter-themed works we’ve come across over the years. First, by MIT’s Snowflake-a-Thon from 2005, and, second, by Jer Thorp’s aforementioned typeflakes project from 2006. As neither of them published the source code, we wanted to make it a point that the 2007 update to this geek/designer tradition would do just that.

So, from us to you: The DLB Snowflake Generator (source code included, pink Christmas tree sold separately).

Happy Holidays from the DLB team.