Selected results from the fourth Scriptographer Workshop at ECAL in Lausanne, held by Jonathan Puckey and Jürg Lehni.

During one week, the students who worked in groups of two to four were taught basics in vector geometry and a simple, limited vocabulary of scripting drawing tools in Scriptographer. The aim was to produce a family of tools that have their origins in clearly defined visual worlds or topics, imitating and automating some of their key characteristics.

The workshop focused on one of the strengths of Scriptographer: The combination of a manual process with automated, script driven tools or processes. Another criteria was that of non-repeating patterns: A manually guided automated script is able to produce visual results that have their own language and resemble printing patterns without simply repeating elements on a regular grid, by repeating logic instead that has an impact on the resulting lines.

By limiting the students to using only black and white and not allowing libraries of predefined drawings, the workshop's focus was aimed at learning an intuitive way of using simple vector geometry and vector algebra in the composition of vector paths and outlines, by using points and vector objects and algebraic operations in a way easy to understand for visually thinking persons.