VISUAL DESIGN
CREATIVE CODING
Resting Bitch Face: A Short Project
For one week, I decided to work on a mini-project a day, which would flex my quick ideation muscles and enable me to let go of my tendency to overthink my designs. I chose Resting Bitch Face as my topic (often feeling insecure about my own) as an attempt to embrace it, and critique people’s judgements on a women’s straight face.
These are some of my favourite outcomes of the week-long project.
TOOLS
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Processing
OpenCV
Day 1
Celebrating a History of Boss Bitches
This day consisted of creating a series of Dorian Legret inspired posters that celebrate leading ladies sporting resting “bitch” faces.
Day 2
Crowdsourced zine: the rbf community
I decided to gather the RBF community to celebrate their beautiful faces. I asked them to send me selfies of their resting faces in a snapchat filter (optimally designed to “fix faces”), along with anecdotes and thoughts on the a resting facial expression that has gotten a misogynistic rep. Examples include:
Sometimes I use my resting bitch face as a shield again unwelcome conversation. - Fifi Xin
I then game myself one hour to design and compile the zine, using photoshop to halftone the images and colored paper for the home-printed images, and a marker to write down the thoughts.
A future iteration would probably use a risograph and more deliberate typography.
Day 3
Paint a Smile on Me: Interactive Poster
On this day, I created an interactive poster using Adobe Photoshop, Processing then later P5.js, which enables users to “fix my face” by drawing on it. This approach is meant to reflect this seemingly inconsequential freedom people believe they have to judge other’s based on appearance. This freedom is translated into a “power of judgement”, and in this case the power to visualise this judgement.
Day 4
Cat Calling Simulator
For my final day on this project, I used processing and OpenCV Facial Recognition to create a cat calling simulator.
The user exposed to the camera is “bombarded” with bold capitalized words like “smile” and “why the face”, and only when the face or camera is covered, does the purpose message appear.
Video demonstration of the final coded concept