Hi there - I'm Greg Leppert,
a curious thinker and tinkerer in Austin TX. I'm glad you made it.
A while back I realized that technology, like art, can change the way we imagine the world. Imagine that.
Curiosity can get you into trouble. I woke up one day, today actually, and suddenly I'd been working as a graphic designer↓, interface designer↓, programmer↓, musician↓ and tinkerer↓ for the last six years. I suppose when you take the comfortable ambiguity out it, they're all essentially the same pursuit, or at least they serve the same foundation. I'm fascinated with the ability of both technology and art to change our perspectives, not only as individuals but as communities. When someone truly connects with a design, physical or digital, there are two things that happen. The first is a forward fascination, a "I'll never look at X the same way again" adoption of the core idea and intent of the design.
The second is a retrospect - a revision or reevaluation of the person's past given what they now know the future holds, in fact what they hold in their very hands today. This ability to change not only the future but also the past - in small ways and big, in the everyday and the coming age - is why I create for other people and why I love experiencing a collision of mediums.
Innography 
Hatch Show Print 
Graffiti 
Passalong Networks 
Quiet Inc. 
EMI / Gotee Records I create things using...
- Javascript,
- Actionscript,
- HTML 4.1 & 5,
- CSS 2 & 3,
- PHP,
- ASP.NET,
- Python,
- MySQL,
- PureData,
- Processing / Wiring,
- Subversion,
- Ruby and Rails,
- AppleScript,
- BASH scripting,
- Photoshop,
- Illustrator,
- Flash,
- Logic Audio,
- Final Cut Pro,
- Textmate,
- and a few others.
greg at formasfunction dot com
HRMI #1 - Don't be still my heart (2009)
We say a lot with our bodies, both consciously and subconsciously, and often times our primary reaction to stimulus is an internalized one. To explore this relationship, I set about using the heart as a control mechanism for a song, a tune familiar enough to be a clear barometer of the subject's internal state to the untrained ear (in this case Vince Guaraldi's "Linus And Lucy") and ended up in a design studio one morning with two friends and a $40 treadmill from Craigslist.
My initial approach involved hacking into the pulsing light of an inexpensive heart rate monitor and wiring that into an Arduino digital pin where it was translated into MIDI via a PureData patch and then fed into Ableton Live to manipulate the sound file. I soon realized that for any activity involving serious heart rate manipulation I'd need a wireless setup. Thankfully I came across Dan Julio's Polar heart rate monitor breakout board allowing me to interface over short distances with a wireless Polar brand heart rate strap. A bit more digging on the PureData side allowed me to forego the MIDI to Ableton Live step altogether and manipulate the song speed directly in PD and output a .wav which was later overlaid on top of the ambient sound recording for the sake of clarity.
An excerpt of the PureData patch
(click for full)
Innography - Corporate Data Mining, You Look Good. (2009)
In November of 2008 I packed up shop in Nashville TN and headed west to join Innography in Austin TX as their lead UI designer and front end programmer. The core of Innography is a web based intellectual property data mining tool that allows clients like Apple, NASA, and Kraft, among others, to research IP and proximal litigation and trademark data in order to better assert and defend their portfolios.
The challenge that we tackled, in the face of slower old guard competitors, was enabling our users to quickly analyze large data sets, often in the millions of entries, while still allowing a robust set of vectors from which to approach their research. Additionally, we integrated a range of data visualization tools that allow users to identify areas of interest within an IP space that would otherwise be buried in lines and lines of data.
When I arrived at the company I worked in partnership with UX specialist Theresa Neil to bring the speed of the UI in line with the speed of their highly optimized database and I continue to design and develop a custom Javascript and PHP templating framework that allows us to rapidly prototype the product going forward.
Info
-
Role: Founder / Do it all
Status: In Hibernation
Tools
- OOP PHP5,
- Javascript,
- jQuery,
- Flash,
- HTML 4.1,
- CSS 2 & 3,
- MySQL,
- Sphinx
Graffiti - The Web is a Canvas (2008)
Like string theory, I often imagine the web as a series of parallel universes in which users are ships in the night, existing for moments in the same space yet obliviously passing each other. This is a shame when you consider that they all share common interests, common by definition of browsing the same pages at relatively the same time as their unseen partners.
Graffiti was a year long attempt to address this, to connect viewers already coexisting with each other, and to foster dialog across the web at a time when major players had yet to enter the space beyond their walled gardens. Graffiti consisted of two parts: a Firefox browser plugin that would inject the "Graffiti Bar" onto any page a user was browsing and a central web page for administering content created through Graffiti. When users arrived at a URL, google for instance, the Graffiti bar allowed users to see if any of their friends were currently viewing or had viewed a particular page or pages within the same domain, within a certain amount of time. Users could then contact each other either through traditional digital mediums or by creating a comment thread injected into the page below the Graffiti bar.
Alas, after a year of hard work and a successful alpha funding ran dry and the project was put on hold.
Passalong Networks - Music as Business is Hard (2006-2007)
With a company culture of innovation, my time at Nashville based Passalong Networks (now defunct, as startups are want to be) was spent developing interfaces to bring Passalong's music delivery network to a variety of devices, from high powered personal computers to anemic tv set top boxes. Here's a short list of some of the projects we were working on before we closed the doors.
SpeakerHeart (2006)
Back in 2007 independent artists were having a hard time selling their music online - getting into the iTunes Music Store required some sort of voodoo and black magic and other retailers were nickel and dime-ing bands out what little money they were able to make. SpeakerHeart was a web application that made it easy to post your music for sale in DRM free formats and leveraged micropayments to make the transactions worthwhile. Bands and fans could also build "shelves" of albums - promotional widgets that could be embedded in social networking sites and other pages.
Scenic (2007)
Mood Jockey (2006)
That Rice Costs Too Much Rice (2008)
Bling bling!
Affluence and poverty, need and want, these things are matters of perspective and when I look at the web I see a malleable perspective - just the type of thing that could be used to help us think outside of ourselves, outside of our normal contexts.
The "price of rice" is a javascript bookmarklet that, when entered into the address bar of a browser, replaces all of the prices on the current webpage with the number of 50lb bags of rice that could be purchased for third world families through an aid organization.
Suddenly that new computer isn't $1,500 - it's 50 bags of rice. That kitschy t-shirt? half a bag. When we hear about lavish expense from an upper class of society we're all prone to doing it - "his private jet was $7,000 a week? That's like a new car every month !" Give it a try - next time maybe you'll remark instead "that's almost 1,000 bags of rice!"
- Download the bookmarklet
- The line to bookmark or paste into your browser's address bar:
javascript:(function(){var%20s=document.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src','http://formasfunction.com/wp-content/themes/formasfunction/media/rice.js');document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);})();
Processing.js Textmate Bundle (2009)
Processing.js is a Javascript / HTML5 Canvas implementation of the popular Processing framework for Java and when I decided to take it for a test drive I soon realized that there weren't any bundles for my editor, Textmate, enabling syntax highlighting for this hybrid incarnation of Processing. As any good programmer would do, I took it upon myself to create one. At it’s core, the bundle ties together two existing bundles – the Javascript bundle that ships with TextMate and the Processing bundle, made for the Java incarnation, that can be downloaded from the official TextMate repository, and you’ll need both of them installed for the Processing.js bundle to work properly. One of the key differences in workflow between Processing and Processing.js is that in order to test a JS script you first must embed it into an HTML page which makes developing quick sketches less fluid. Given that nuisance, one of the main features of the bundle is a hot-key triggered preview that allows you to write a pure Processing.js sketch with no wrapper HTML and preview it instantly in your open browsers.
Javascript Router (2009)
While relatively powerful as is, accessing and modifying the browser url through Javascript still leaves much to be desired. With more and more web applications storing data in window.location.hash to construct and reconstruct the page, it stands to reason that there should be an easy way to manipulate the data stored there. Filling that gap, the JS router is a convenient global object that seeks to provide easy access to the following functionality:
- Access to variables stored in the URL both in window.location.search and window.location.hash
The router parses any part of the url matching the syntax name=value and places it one of two places:
router.hash_GET and router.search_GET. A combination of two can be accessed at router.GET - Modification and destruction of variables stored in the URL both in window.location.search and window.location.hash
Name value pairs can be created and set using router.SET({name:value, name2:value2}); - Access to url scope by parsing the folder structure
For instance /depth1/depth2/depth3 becomes router.url_items=["depth1","depth2","depth3"] allowing access via router.url_items[1] etc. - Allow easy integration with HIJAX solutions
Since the router is aware of each change in the hash, it can easily be used to control the point at which a history record is added to a HIJAX implementation - Download Now
Anathallo - Floating World Artist Friendship (2006)
Floating World tells the Japanese folk tale of a farmer who kills his neighbor's dog and, while burning the body to hide his deed, a great wind picks up the ashes and sends them into a tree, causing its flowers to bloom. Everything about this package was custom and it involved a lot of calls with the printer - laser cutting, metallic inks, and a custom die that folds everything together into a self contained package. The band was very happy.
Relient K - Mmhmm Gotee Records (2004)
After jumping on a tour bus with the band for a week, I had an opportunity to get to know the band I was designing for which, oddly enough, is somewhat rare. Their up and coming album was going to be a departure from the pop punk that typified their previous three and watching them interact, listening to the new songs from city to city, proved to be invaluable in designing a cover that matched their transition into a more mature sound and ended up selling close to a million copies.
Various Artists - Album Covers
Hatch Show Print (2008)
I had the privilege of volunteering as a designer, typesetter and printer at Hatch Show Print, a historic letterpress studio in the heart of downtown Nashville. After operating independently since 1879, Hatch was purchased by the Country Music Hall of Fame to preserve it's deep history of producing posters for the country greats like Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline and new acts like Wilco and The White Stripes. At Hatch you learn to produce everything the old fashioned way, setting 100 year old wood and lead type and carving new blocks for graphics in your design and, as a designer, that'll change the way you think about type.
Music is music to my ears.
I've been playing music in one form or another almost my entire life, from classical to rock and roll, and it's probably the single greatest influence on my thought process as an artist and programmer. Harmony, rhythm, timbre - the language of music has worked its way into almost every other medium and they're descriptors that I strive to embody from the code that I write to the album covers I design.
Music has taken me on tours across the U.S. and Canada, it's been my profession at points, and it's taught me how to create for myself while creating for an audience. If ever you wanted a child to learn how to work in teams, how to offer up ideas to a group with a degree of ownership yet a willingness to compromise in order to get everyone on board, encourage them to start a band.
Foxhole (2001-present)
Foxhole is an instrumental "post-rock" band writing songs that run the gamut of genres yet touching on themes common enough that our fans don't much care about what genre it all falls under. I play keys and trumpet, using horn melodies where vocal lines might normally sit, and work as the primary arranger. You can find our songs in everything from documentaries to the BMX videos of clothing maker Etnies.
Anathallo (2006)
Once described by a reviewer as "a band of gypsies," I joined Anathallo in the spring of 2006 in the midst of signing with Nettwerk Management (Sarah McLachlan, Chromeo, among others) and shared the stage with artists like Dashboard Confessional and Saves the Day. After months of solid touring including a slot at SXSW, I left the band to join Passalong Networks back in Nashville.Four Eyes Are Better Than One Eye (2003) Mixed media on canvas
Myself and a partner (Matthew Wilson) hung a blank canvas in a well trafficked gallery space and each night for a week, after the space had closed, one of us would enter the gallery and modify the canvas, starting with Matthew and alternating nights. Each time, a polaroid of the canvas was taken just prior to modification and attached to the left. As well, each night the process of modification was filmed and compiled into a high speed video containing all modification to date, displayed on a tv to the right.Big Valley (2005) Marker, paint on plexiglass tubing
In the summer of 2005, the crabber boat Big Valley capsized and sank in the Bering Sea claiming five lives, including that of a friend. His body was never found; I imagine it to be endlessly circling the earth, a subaqueous apparition riding the currents, forever tied to the sea.