Want To Try Creative Coding? Start Here
The goal of creative coding is to create something beautiful instead of something functional.
A lot of people not familiar with programming assume that coding is boring by default. Coding is for nerds. And not just any nerds, but nerds who excel in math and live in front of their computers. While this is partially true (and was definitely true 20 or 30 years ago), there is — as always — the other side of the coin not everyone gets to see.
When art and science properly come together, they create something unexpected and refreshingly new.
If you write code long enough, you start realizing that coding is just like art. It starts with an idea, then you select the right tools, create your first draft, and keep perfecting it until you love the result. While it’s hard to see it in a terminal…
..it’s pretty apparent when you look at the artistic world of creative coding.
Examples of Creative Coding
The truth is that software development requires a lot of creativity. And creative coding is here to show it.
The Internet is full of breathtaking examples of creative coding like the featured image by Shirley. True, digital art is not as functional as, say, your average calculator app, but who cares? Her portfolio is probably one of the prettiest things I’ve seen in a while.
And don’t even get me started on Android Jones. His digital art is just unbelievable. Period. I saw his 360 Immersive Experience at a music festival once and it was like the coolest thing ever:
Just like other artists, creative coders create art for galleries, shows, events, private parties, interactive installations, music festivals, etc. Some great examples include Artechouse, Superblue in Miami, Van Gogh Experience, and other amazing places I still need to visit.
If you’ve been to The Dalí (Salvador Dalí Museum) in St Petersburgh, Florida, you know what I’m talking about. The whole place is like a huge digital playground where art comes alive thanks to modern technologies.
And finally, this short video sums up what creative coding is all about perfectly:
What Do Creative Coders Do?
Creative coders are also writing code for artistic purposes. Most of them use computer programming as a creative discipline to generate sounds, images, animations, 3D installations, and more.
Where To Start?
While creative coding is still not mainstream, the demand is definitely there. There are creative coding awards, contests, hackathons, courses, books, and thousands of open jobs. Most of the time, you are not required to have a college degree to become a professional creative coder. A beautiful portfolio that contains amazing creative coding pieces will speak for itself.
A lot of professional creative coders start as artists, data analysts, or software developers. You can even start from scratch, it’s just going to be harder to master creative coding without a computer science background (but not impossible!). There is not that much information out there on creative coding, compared to other artistic subjects, but most of it is free. YouTube, for example, can become your first teacher.
Creative Coding Courses:
- Create 3D Graphics in JS Using WebGL — Get started creating content with WebGL.
- Creative Coding for Complete Beginners — A free, beginner-friendly course on YouTube.
- Learn HTML5 Graphics and Animation — Introduction to the canvas 2D drawing API.
- Creative Coding — Bite-sized courses on Skillshare.
- Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL — How to use Canvas and WebGL with the ThreeJS JavaScript library.
- Interactive Computer Graphics — Computer graphics course from Coursera.
- Think. Create. Code — EDX course to learn programming with ProcessingJS.
- Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation — Use JavaScript and JS libraries to create drawings and animations.
- Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps — Coursera course on creative coding with processing.
- Imaginary Institute — Learn how to create gorgeous interactive graphics.
- Future Learn: Creative Coding — Use computer programming as a creative discipline to generate sounds, images, animations, and more.
- Advanced JS: Natural Simulations — Combine JS, ProcessingJS, and mathematical concepts to simulate nature in creative coding programs.
- Interactive Data Visualization with Processing — Learn how to read, map, and illustrate data with Processing.
- Programming Data Visualizations: A Coding Toolkit for Processing — Join information designer Nicholas Felton to learn more about Processing.
Creative Coding Books:
- The Book of Shaders — Step-by-step guide through the abstract and complex universe of fragment shaders.
- Learn OpenGL — Extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL.
- Scratchapixel 2.0 — Learn Computer Graphics From Scratch.
- ofBook — Community-written book/guide on openFrameworks.
- OGLdev — Collection of modern OpenGL tutorials by Etay Meiri.
- OpenGL Tutorial — Site dedicated to tutorials for OpenGL 3.3 and later.
- Open.gl — Guide that teaches you the basics of using OpenGL.
- Pixel Shaders — Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming.
- OpenGLBook — Free OpenGL programming tutorial in online book format.
- Graphics Programming Projects — Book about 3D computational graphics by Morgan McGuire.
- Computer Graphics from Scratch — A raytracing and rasterization textbook that teaches you how OpenGL and DirectX works.
- 3D Game Shaders For Beginners — Step-by-step guide to real-time shading techniques.
- WebGL Academy — Learn WebGL and 3D algorithmic in a progressive and interactive way.
These and other resources can be found in this amazing GitHub repository devoted to creative coding. Check it out to see the full list of books and courses, frameworks, languages, tutorials, and more. This repository alone is worth years of formal education.
After you have a general idea about what creative coding is about, you’ll need to pick a framework and select a course devoted to that framework. Language is important too; it might be Python, JavaScript, or something else entirely. If you are comfortable with JavaScript, then JavaScript P5. js library is what you would use for Creative Coding. Python programmers might use The Turtle package for Creative Coding. There’s also a Python Mode of the Processing Programming Language that most Creative Coding artists use for their projects.
I hope this article inspired you to explore the world of creative coding even further or at least showed you the beautiful side of programming. I’m thinking about creating a creative coding tutorial sometime soon, so stay tuned!
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