Randomization Poster Series - 04 // Diffraction

About a year ago, I finished coding a randomization plugin for Adobe Illustrator called Randomill. What this plugin allows users to do is to randomize various properties of a group of objects in Illustrator. For example, if you had a group of squares, you could easily randomize their colors to generate a colorful grid. This poster series is a demonstration of what can be accomplished with this plugin.

Horizontally scaling an overlapping grid of rectangles and randomly applying a fill color from a set of 5 gradients to each rectangle can produce the above effect. This YouTube tutorial shows how this can be done. The crucial step is to have a top layer with a 5-step linear gradient set to the ‘exclusion’ or ‘difference’ blend mode to achieve those vertical bands of color throughout the entire poster.