Coloring The Sandbox With thisissand.com

"thisissand.com is a website for play. It changes the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on."

A joint project by the designers Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela with the Flash programmer Timo Koro, who wanted to create a playground of colors and sound for people to play with them in their sandbox.

To find out a little bit more about their site I sat down with Jenna, Johanna and Timo, turned over an hourglass, and had a chat about things:

COLOURlovers: What inspired you to create This Is Sand?

thisissand.com: The project is a result of a lengthy discussion. We started off with making an animation out of visually interesting computer glitches and related sounds. In the process, we were referring to the computer as a sandbox - a place where you play with given matter, using your imagination to mold it in infinite ways. Just like that, we actually started moving towards to what thisissand.com is today.

CL: What do you do when you are not playing with sand?

thisissand.com: Graphic design, Flash programming, writing and concept design.

COLOURlovers: What inspired you to create This Is Sand?

thisissand.com: The project is a result of a lengthy discussion. We started off with making an animation out of visually interesting computer glitches and related sounds. In the process, we were referring to the computer as a sandbox - a place where you play with given matter, using your imagination to mold it in infinite ways. Just like that, we actually started moving towards to what thisissand.com is today.

CL: What do you do when you are not playing with sand?

thisissand.com: Graphic design, Flash programming, writing and concept design.

CL: Has the sandbox always been your favorite part of a playground?

thisissand.com: Yes. Jenna remembers making a lot of sand cakes as a child, tapping on the mold and repeating the sentence: "Don't be a bad cake, be a good cake." Johanna did the same, trying to make the perfect cake. It never really happened. Making pretty sand creations is not easy!

CL: Is there one particular playground from your childhood that stands out in your mind?

thisissand.com: The beach had a lot of sand...

CL: On the you about page you mention Fluxus, can you talk a little about Fluxus and how thisissand is a representation of those ideas and paradigms.

thisissand.com: With thisissand.com, we wanted to create a place for recreation and fun. It's an eternal work in progress. The art of the piece is in what people do with our creation.

CL: Is your work space a big sandbox, tell me about the space in where you do your best work?

thisissand.com: Timo and Jenna are working in Helsinki at the moment while Johanna is based in London, so we work together over the internet. The mailbox is our sandbox.

CL: Timo, how about some info regarding the building of thisissand.com.

thisissand.com:I can say that it is actually a very simple program with straight forward bitmap manipulation. The hardest part making it was to come up with the routine of the sand particles falling on top of each other, and especially make it as fast as possible! Still, it could use a lot less computing power, as some better programmer could easily tell. Suggestions for better are welcome!

What comes to the color selection of the application, we are using Ryan Taylor's ColorBar class, which gives us a nice code generated spectrum. Maybe someone at COLOURlovers knows a more complete code based spectrum that would include the shades of gray as well?

More from the thisissand.com Gallery

The COLOURlovers forum about thisissand.com can be seen here.