The ‚Hard Fork‘ is a still frame of a procedural line animation that splits into two forks. The design brief stated that the animation should depict a situation which resembles a Hard Fork:

noun / ‚härd ‚fork /

1. A radical change to a computing protocol that makes all previous versions incompatible with the new protocol.
2. A new podcast that explores stories from the wild frontier of tech and the future that’s already here.

A custom software written in Processing is generating the appropiate  drawing canvas and fills it live with the colors, glyphs and animates the whole in a tack sharp and pixel perfect manner. The „still frame“ for the Cover artwork is therefore only a part of a bigger and looping animation, where each single character is moving.

Client: The New York Times
Release: October 7, 2022
Hosts: Kevin Roose, Casey Newton
Art Direction / Design: Benjamin Tousley
Artwork: Julian Hespenheide, Custom software in Processing (ASCII Tool v.0.1)
Press release: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/podcasts/hard-fork-technology.html