Creative Coding Experiments
A collection of sketches exploring p5.js fundamentals, audio reactivity, and computational design.
Overview
I started with Daniel Shiffman's Coding Train beginner course, learning p5.js fundamentals through playful experiments. Later, I took Tim Rodenbröker's course, diving deeper into computational design principles. These sketches represent my learning journey—from basic shape manipulation to audio-reactive visualizations and image processing.
There's something deeply satisfying about writing code that creates something beautiful and surprising.
Code as creative medium: Programming isn't just functional—it's a way to think, experiment, and express ideas visually.
Iterative experimentation: The best discoveries came from playing with parameters, breaking things, and following curiosity rather than planning everything upfront.
Living in İzmir means frequent encounters with pelicans around the city. I've been photographing them for a while, and it felt natural to bring these images into my creative coding experiments.
Cursor Zoom Effect: Created an interactive magnifying glass that follows the mouse, letting viewers explore details of pelican feathers and textures up close.
Pixelation: Wrote code to break down the photographs into varying pixel sizes, creating mosaic-like interpretations.
ASCII Art Conversion: Transformed pelican images into ASCII characters, mapping brightness values to different symbols.
👋🏻 Personal Notes
These projects live alongside my professional work because they represent a different kind of problem-solving. In healthcare web development, I optimize for clarity and usability. In creative coding, I optimize for surprise and aesthetic discovery.
One of my favorite discoveries was the random() function. There's something magical about introducing controlled chaos into your code—you write the rules, but you don't entirely know what you'll get. Each refresh brings a new variation.
The design process here is completely different from my UX work. In creative coding, you design while coding. You change a parameter, run it, see what happens, adjust. It's immediate, iterative, and playful. The code is both the tool and the canvas.
Making sketches interactive adds another dimension. When the visualization responds to your cursor or clicks, it stops being just something you look at and becomes something you play with. That shift from passive to active viewing changes the entire experience.
