A little disappointing that there doesn't seem to be anything more in-depth than "An algorithm did it" in the article, or it seems in any of the articles I could find on this.
> HP Mosaic takes the vector PDF file as input (also known as a Seed file), and generates a large number of variations on the file by transforming it — scaling, transposition, and rotation — randomly.
Okay, that's a little disappointing—I was hoping for some sort of image generation, rather than just cropping. But the output still looks good, so I'm not going complain too loudly.
I'm somewhat disappointed that they just used a feature in a consumer program to do this. I expected it to be some "collaboration", ala " ferrero x hp ".
I don't think it detracts from the creative achievement. The designer still has to know how to use the tool properly and make good choices for the patterns and colors.
But yeah, the headline is silly. It's the equivalent of "Vogue hired an algorithm to touch up new photos of models."
I agree. There's a wide range of possibilities here.
In the most basic implementation, you'd have 6 features, each with 14 possibilities, and you choose one option from each and combine them. That gets you 7.5 million combinations.
A more sophisticated implementation might pull from a larger number of features and options and apply complex transforms to produce nonformulaic output.
My guess is that what's actually cutting-edge here is not the algorithm or the designs, but the ability to print custom labels at all. My guess, though, is that it's only cost-effective as a publicity stunt. Printing 7 million identical labels is likely far less expensive.
Identical labels will usually use flexographic printing with cut steel templates which transfer the ink to the plastic. Being able to customize each bottle is pretty cool in its own right.
It was first used in a Coke marketing campaign in 2014 ...
http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/extraordinary-collec...