#extendscript

I’d rather read Goethe and Schiller because I am very German, but a few updates are in order.

I have worked with ChatGPT to finally crack programmatically using the Adobe line of software, and so far I have a few successes here and there, to which I will return later in this post.

I put together a small set of scripts on Github, if you are into that.

Then I have spent a lot of time working on my personal website’s layout and display, but that is still very much a work in progress right now, because I just started scratching away at ARIA, and thinking about my website as a useful interface for content. I actually immensely enjoy the serif I use for body text, it is the Cormorant Garamond, by CatharsisFonts, and you can find that here.

I am still doing quite a few adjustments on my website, nudging it closer to the ebook sweet spot. I think you can see the influence Apple Books has had on a few decisions here and there.

There is a dark version in the works, too. I was already experimenting with that.

What else?

The informational bot service called Grafikdesignfeed (on Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and on Twitter) has been improved further over the last two weeks: more feed sources, better curation, a lot of huginn intergration and logic wrangling before it all gets sent to buffer to be syndicated to various platforms.

There was a lot of optimization potential there, which I am now glad I figured out. Thanks to ChatGPT again, I was able to work backwords from the results I aimed for and design the fastest and most efficient path to get this project there.

Rebuilt the permalink structures for my website and my social wall as well. worked with solid redirects, so that absolutely nobody gets lost in the translation from structure to structure: I am forcing usablility and accessibility into these online projects as hard as I can, and the new permalinks work because of that, I’d like to think.

Also, there was type experiments going on this week and last week. I was channeling my own graphic design nerd and went to town.

Equipped with ChatGPT, I pulled out BlackInk and built my very first pixel shader brush.

And it is a just so much fun to use it with a pressure sensitive pen!

I even uploaded one demo to my Youtube account, which I never use for anything.

And I put the code for the brush everywhere: on my cara.app account, in the description of the video on Youtube, even put together a page to store these experiments on my website, so that people can always refer back to that, and use these things themselves. For inspiration. For whatever.

Even linked that and the other thing, a small calculator for lines per page, on that page, and on my bento.me

I figured that using that to link to these projects makes sense if I want to post something, say, on Instagram and instead of having the hassle of trying to use links there, I can just say to go to my bento.me and click on the box which matches the post.

Which I did.

Called the page the toolbox, and well, it is. Will need to update it with the next thing. The bento.me page, the other project is already on my toolbox page.

I think I am missing something, but this is my after hours blog: polish is not what I do here.

And this brings me to the final part for today: using ExtendScript to take glyphs from five typefaces I chose for being different from each other, channeled my understanding of David Carson’s print work into it, and went exploring.

Pictures say more than words.

So I did this: put together several versions of an ExtendScript to talk to Illustrator programmatically, to glitch the word “frakt” (which is my server’s name, I have christened him that recently), then I sorted through all these outlines and forms, printed my favorites, and scanned the printouts, glitching the word by moving the scanner, sort of making brush strokes. And then sorted through these scans. Below are my favorites from this fun afternoon spent in flow.

I teased most of these on my instagram stories, because that is how I treat those: as a behind the scenes, teaser type of thing.

See you next time. Man, those are a lot of hashtags. Well, I did say I wanted to be embedded into the culture inside graphic design, so forget about marketing, choom.

That last one is actually a photograph shot with a macro, because look at those subpixel edges !

EDIT: a sh*t, yeah, and I put together a script for WordPress which gathers all links from inside an article upon publish and sends it off to linkwarden to be stored (and also to archive.org via linkwarden, which is way more wiz than what I did).

I now know what I will use Linkwarden for: to be a vault for my actualy links. Fight the link rot, build your own web, live forever.

Hey everyone! I wanted to share a little story about a recent frustration that turned into a small coding adventure. If you’re into digital art, scripting, or just curious about how I hack my workflow with a Wacom and Photoshop, this one’s for you. It’s a mix of trial and error, some helpful AI assistance, and the realities of working with Adobe’s scripting quirks. Here’s how a simple idea grew into a few scripts I’m actually pretty proud of.

It’s probably well into Monday by the time you’re reading this, because I’m writing it a bit after midnight.

There was a minor grievance with how Photoshop doesn’t interact with my Wacom tablet; and that small annoyance somehow turned into two scripts (three, really) I built with the help of ChatGPT to address the issue.

What I wanted was simple: adjust the flow of a brush in Photoshop using the Wacom tablet’s Ring Menu.

The idea seemed straightforward: turn clockwise to increase the flow value, counter‑clockwise to reduce it; just like how you can zoom or rotate the canvas in Photoshop. I assumed there’d be hotkeys for increasing and decreasing flow that I could bind to the Ring Menu.

But those hotkeys? They don’t exist. Sure, you can use Shift + (0–9) to directly set the flow value, but that’s not what I was after. It’s functional, but not how I want things to work.

So I asked ChatGPT how a script would look that toggles a brush’s blend mode between Normal and Multiply, just to get started. I cleaned up the output using Copilot, admittedly got a bit carried away, tested it, and…it worked! At the push of an ExpressKey, I could switch blend modes.

I posted that script to Stack Overflow, asking for feedback on the quality of an LLM’s output. Turns out, they have a ban on LLM-generated content. Got my downvotes.

Anyway.

Next, I tackled what I really wanted: using the tablet’s ring input to control brush flow. I told ChatGPT what I had in mind, and got a script in return.

And it worked exactly as intended. It let me adjust flow by rotating the Ring—and it felt fast and snappy.

But there was a catch: it didn’t retain any of the other brush settings. Instead, it reset everything to Photoshop’s default brush when applied.

That’s when I visited the Adobe Community forums for the first time. I browsed around, read what others had done with ExtendScript—and I was genuinely amazed. I upvoted. I even commented.

Eventually, I posted my issue. [Here’s the thread, if you’re curious.] Someone responded and suggested I adapt a script from another post, and I did.

It worked. Kind of.

See, the adapted version was (and still is, as of this writing) slow. Unlike the earlier, snappy version that only touched the flow value, this one has to read, store, and then re-apply all the other brush properties every time it’s called. So if you do a quick half-circle on the Ring, you’ll be watching the flow change lag behind for a while after you’ve stopped rotating. (Fun fact: the Ring doesn’t physically rotate; Wacom employs witches and wizards, obviously)

But it worked and that’s something. Since the bottleneck is due to how Photoshop’s scripting interface works, not my implementation, I decided to upload the scripts to GitHub. For myself (should someone find a better solution), and for others (should this be the best workaround we’ve got).

At some point, I asked ChatGPT:

“This is so confusing. Why can’t we just add the changed value for flow to the existing brush settings, and leave everything else untouched?”

And it answered:

“TL;DR: You can’t just ‘set flow’ without overwriting everything else, because Photoshop scripting doesn’t support partial updates to ActionDescriptors.”

And that’s where things stand: somewhere between not as fast as it could be in a better world (where Adobe supports partial updates), and doing it all manually, dragging sliders around with the mouse.

The other thing I did this week was build a custom RSS parser in Huginn for my Goodreads “read” shelf. With ChatGPT helping me outline the approach, everything went surprisingly smoothly.

Since I wanted to post to Twitter/X and Threads every time I finished a book—and include its genre as hashtags—I started adding custom shelves on Goodreads for genres.

These genre shelves show up in the RSS feed that Goodreads generates, which made them accessible for automation.

However, because IFTTT can’t really parse RSS feeds to manipulate or modify content (like extracting specific info or adding hashtags), I turned to Huginn—a trusty old friend whose scripting language I had completely forgotten.

Thanks to guidance from ChatGPT and some trial and error, I ended up with an internal setup in Huginn that looks like this:

And it works! I expect to need some more tweaking, though. There’s a bit of randomness in the setup: ChatGPT suggested using a modulo operation on the date to select one out of six variations of the text “Read: [Title of book]” to send to the Output agent, so my posts don’t look exactly the same every time.

I’m not sure if or when I’ll add this script to my GitHub, but chances are good. For now, I really need some sleep; these late nights chasing dragons through trial and error must come to an end.

I’m pretty happy to anounce a new small script I created for Adobe After Effects called RigtRect.

I developed the basic functionality behind the script some years ago while animating multiple boxes, squares and rectangles for this motion design piece. It allways frustated me that shape layer rectangles scaled from its center, but all I wanted was to animate the x and y values of the borders.

Skip ahead some years till now and I further developed the technique, trying to make the rig as rock solid and easy handle and understand as possible. I also tried to keep the script and the corresponding panel really simple to avoid any headache in the daily workflow of us motion designers. Therefore the script is fully compatible with the popular kbar extension.

Besides regular shape layer rectangles I’ve found two ways to scale all other (footage) layers. Look out for the RigtSource and RigtFill functions.

If you are now curious enough, just go to gum.co/rigtrect and get the script now. The script is compatible with After Effects CC 2015 and newer. If you through one buck extra into my hat you get the project files* of the promo video above to explore some techniques of building dynamic layouts and animations in After Effects. *music and fonts not included.

You can find a comprehensive documentation here: docs.dezignphreak.com/rigtrect

Here is a video walkthrough containing all important features of the script:

My process of color grading in After Effects mostly looks like this: I grade every shot separatly from the beginning to the end of the video. The problem here: the look shifts slightly throughout the film. The solution: I drag the main composition into a new one and make a grid to get an overview over the different shots. This way changes on your color grading or other adjustments are updated in the overview comp.

To speed up this tedious process of duplicating and aligning the shots I wrote a little script which is now part of the AB Motion Tools on github. The usage is very simple:

Precomp your main comp.

Place markers on the main comp layer where you want the representing frame of the shot to be.

Run the ab-makeGrid.jsx script via File > Scripts > Run Script File.. (or a script launcher like KBar).

It will detect the number of markers and make a proper grid of time freezed frames of your shots. The script will also leave the corresponding marker on the shot frame, so it’s easier to jump to the right time in the video.

If the selected layer has no markers the script will ask you how many tiles you want to create. So it’s also useful for creating beautiful cover grids.

You can download the ab-makeGrid.jsx script alongside others over on the github repository:

I created a public github repository for smaller scripts and tools which fall out of my daily job as motion designer. Right now you can find some scripts for After Effects including fitting icons for use in K-Bar & Co.

→ https://github.com/arnebreusing/ab-motion-tools

I recently started to strengthen my skills in scripting for after effects. I was allready in love with expressions and extendscript (or basically javascript) is only a step further down road of making the software do the repetative work for you, while the designer can focus more on the creative part of his work.

The first product of the new learning is a script called TextShapes. It contains two functions: make a background or an underline of a text layer in your After Effects composition. I tried to make it as rocksolid as possible. It’s not limited to text layers but also works for any other layer (except a camera and light layer since they have no dimensions). The layers have multiple options on order to make them work very responsive. Check out the overview video below.

Three keyfeatures:

Responsive & dynamic: TextShapes adapt and stick precisely to their parent layer.

Flexible: TextShapes are based on shape layers and therefore very customizable.

Fast: create TextShapes within miliseconds and animate them in no time with the convenient options.

For now you can download the script for free over at gumroad. But don’t wait to long, I might change my mind later: https://gum.co/textshapes