Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Engineering behind Figma’s Vector Networks (via) Fascinating post by Alex Harri (in 2019) describing FIgma’s unique approach to providing an alternative to the classic Bézier curve pen tool. It includes a really clear explanation of Bézier curves, then dives into the alternative, recent field of vector networks which support lines and curves between any two points rather than enforcing a single path.

# 3rd February 2024, 11:08 pm / bezier, graphics

3D Gaussian Splatting—Why Graphics Will Never Be The Same (via) Gaussian splatting is an intriguing new approach to 3D computer graphics that’s getting a lot of buzz at the moment. This 2m11s YouTube video is the best condensed explanation I’ve seen of the key idea.

# 9th December 2023, 6:06 am / 3d, graphics

Write shaders for the Vegas sphere (via) Alexandre Devaux built this phenomenal three.js / WebGL demo, which displays a rotating flyover of the Vegas Sphere and lets you directly edit shader code to render your own animations on it and see what they would look like. The via Hacker News thread includes dozens of examples of scripts you can paste in.

# 1st December 2023, 6:45 pm / 3d, graphics

Draw SVG rope using JavaScript (via) Delightful interactive tutorial by Stanko Tadić showing how to render an illustration of a rope using SVG, starting with a path. The way the tutorial is presented is outstanding.

# 31st December 2022, 5:31 pm / explorables, svg, graphics, javascript

Lou’s Pseudo 3d Page. Spectacularly detailed exploration of the road graphics used in racing games prior to true 3D. This is a potential gold mine for anyone looking for a fun project to try out with canvas. Bonus points for comet integration—I’m still looking forward to the first real-time multiplayer game in the browser using comet and canvas.

# 8th February 2010, 11:21 am / graphics, comet, 3d, canvas, javascript, html5

Google Chart API (via) Really neat charting API from Google—simply encode your chart data and configuration options in to a URL and Google will serve up a nicely rendered PNG. No API key required. It’s like a documented version of the Google Groups rounded corners API.

# 6th December 2007, 5:37 pm / google, apis, charting, png, graphics

VectorMagic. Neat online tool (with a Flex frontend) for tracing bitmap images in to vectors, based on research at the Stanford AI lab.

# 28th October 2007, 11:46 am / stanford, images, vectors, graphics, flex, flash, vectormagic

CSS Transforms. WebKit can now do transforms (scale, rotate, translate and skew) in CSS via a new -webkit-transform property. Transforms behave like position relative in that they don’t affect the layout of the page. You can also provide a full affine transform matrix as a shortcut.

# 26th October 2007, 9:45 pm / matrix, transforms, affinetransformation, graphics, webkit, safari, apple, css, browsers

Idea: The Histogram as the Image. How to hide the New York City skyline in the histogram of an image.

# 30th September 2007, 9:34 pm / histogram, image, graphics