Hartmut Bohnacker et al. Generative Design

Most plots are dull because the idea behind them is dull, and Generative Design is one of the best cures for an empty sketchbook I know. It’s a richly illustrated guide to making images with code in Processing — organised around color, shape, type and motion — and it works less like a tutorial and more like a sourcebook you flip through hunting for the next thing to plot.

What it teaches

The book treats visual programming as a way to think about form: how a simple rule, repeated and varied, produces structure you’d never draw by hand. Each chapter pairs a concept with runnable code and a wall of variations, so you see immediately how changing a parameter changes the result. That parameter-poking is the real lesson, and it’s exactly the habit that makes a generative artist.

From screen to pen

The examples are screen-first, written to be displayed rather than drawn, so the craft on your side is translation. Many of the forms here — line fields, packed shapes, type as geometry — are already vector-friendly and convert nicely once you export to SVG and clean them in vpype for a single continuous pen path. The fills and gradients are where you’ll do the thinking, reinterpreting solid areas as hatching or stippling that a pen can actually lay down.

Level and value

This isn’t the very first book I’d hand a non-coder; it assumes you can find your way around a Processing sketch and rewards a little fluency. As a working reference and a relentless source of ideas, though, it earns its place. Keep it next to the machine, steal a technique a week, and your plots stop looking generic.