I stumbled across some interesting graphic design and typography work this weekend courtesy of Benedikt Groß. Benedikt just completed his studies at HFG Schwäbisch Gmünd and focused on Generative Systems. His thesis project, produced in collaboration with Julia Laub, yielded a fantastic series of posters documenting their experiments with Adobe Indesign scripting and Processing. The posters are definitely worth looking at, and Benedikt has been so kind as to share his Indesign scripts which are available for download to anyone interested. Some of the scripts lend themselves to auto-annotation of design syntax (i.e. the point size of every word is written underneath it) and others deal with paper-space (i.e. a rectangle is generated at the end of each line of text which demarcates the ragged right side of a left-justified paragraph). There is also a processing applet for generating recursive tiling patterns which can be used to determined nested grid systems like the one utilized in the image above.

I've had quite a bit of fun playing with these scripts over the weekend (Mr.TexlineRest is my favourite) and they reignited my interest in generative strategies in layout and typography. I fell out of the loop with generative graphic design at the tail end of the reign of Auto-Illustrator. If there is any other software or Adobe scripts out there along these lines please let me know.