Graphic + Web Design

Google's Top Draw

December 5, 2008 Cornering the search engine market is but just one of Google’s many talents. We’ve been wowed by Google Earth and Google Maps. They also acquired and re-developed Sketch Up, a 3-D drawing and architectural drawing tool. Now Google is venturing into other application development and this latest one is kind of a pleasant surprise.
Top Draw is an “algorithmic image generation application”, or so says Google. Underneath the hood, Top Draw utilizes all of the graphic technologies found in OSX Leopard, like Quartz and Coreimage rendering. The code-base, interestingly enough, is very much like JavaScript. There are some pre-built scripts that come with Top Draw. You can open them up and play around with the parameters and values to make your own graphics. These graphics can be exported as JPEGs or as Desktop images.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of documentation, at least not yet, but the WIKI does have some sample code and images. I was able to create the following images with the app:

Image by Al Lemieux

Just imagine the type of background images you could create for your web pages. Give Top Draw a try over at: http://code.google.com/p/topdraw/downloads/list

Image by Al Lemieux

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