Branding the Q&A-Sessions

Since summer 2020 I have been conducting the so-called Q&A sessions for my students and patrons. These are virtual meetings where the community can ask questions. For each session I invite a special guest from my network whose ideas or work I find particularly interesting for the community.

In June 2020 I started thinking about an appropriate visual branding for the announcements of the Q&A sessions. The requirements for this were relatively high:

Since I have to use different social media channels, there are different formats that are needed. The effort involved in designing the announcements should not take more than an hour. Furthermore, there should be a uniform visual appearance that makes the announcements immediately identifiable.

After some research I found out that Processing can be scripted with the command line. You can also pass parameters to the command line, which the sketch can then read.

In other words: It is possible to create a flexible Processing- application that can generate a responsive output for any media format.

This was the initial spark for the development of the dynamic branding system for the Q&A sessions.

The Shell-script i wrote looks like this:

/opt/processing-3.5.4/processing-java --sketch=./announcement --run 1200 900 "_43" 299
/opt/processing-3.5.4/processing-java --sketch=./announcement --run 900 900  "_11" 299
/opt/processing-3.5.4/processing-java --sketch=./announcement --run 1920 1080 "_169" 299
/opt/processing-3.5.4/processing-java --sketch=./announcement --run 800 600 "_gif" 89
ffmpeg -i ./announcement_gif.mp4 announcement_gif.gif

All data for each event is stored in a JSON-file, so that the Processing sketch does not need to be changed when the data is updated. All design changes are derived from this data.

{
	"guest": "Sander Sturing\n(Studio Dumbar)",
	"day":22,
	"month":10,
	"year":2020,
	"time": "6pm (CET)"
}