Design by Numbers (John Maeda, 1999)

Design by Numbers (DBN) is a small programming language and editor that John Maeda made at the MIT Media Lab and released in 1999. It was meant for visual designers and artists who had never programmed: every program draws a picture, and the numbers lie, as a rule, between 0 and 100.^1, 2, 3 It was also the direct ancestor of Processing.

Four commands

Maeda's own introduction starts with three commands, each followed by numbers:²

• Paper 50 covers the drawing area in 50% black, a middle grey. Paper 0 is white, Paper 100 black.
• Pen 100 sets the pen to 100% black; Pen 0 is a white pen.
• Line 0 0 100 100 draws a line between two points, from the lower left corner (0 0) to the upper right corner (100 100).

The fourth, Repeat, runs the commands inside its braces again and again while a variable counts. In Maeda's example, Repeat A 0 100 { Pen A Line A 0 A 100 } draws 101 vertical lines, each a little darker than the one before, from white on the left to black on the right.² The program in the picture above uses the same four commands: Line A 0 100 A joins a point moving along the bottom edge to a point moving up the right edge, and the 101 straight lines together make a curve.

On screen the drawing sat on the left and the program on the right, as in the picture.¹ The language added variables and conditions to these drawing commands, but it was deliberately not a general-purpose language like C or Java.¹ Ben Fry later called it "under-featured, and intentionally so".⁴

Live sketch

New drawing

The project

DBN came with three parts: the software, which ran in a web browser or could be downloaded; a book, Design by Numbers, from MIT Press; and courseware for teachers.¹ Maeda made version 1.0. Ben Fry made versions 2 and 3, and Casey Reas wrote the courseware; the last version, 3.0.1, is still offered on the MIT site.⁵

Maeda wrote in 2005 that he made DBN at a time when getting artists and designers to program "was just beginning to become in vogue", and that "The actual point of the book was to get more non-programmers to program as a means to hopefully realize how boring programming can be" – and then to imagine a better kind of programming.⁶ Fry and Reas, who looked after DBN, "felt that they had the right designs for a new solution". Processing, which they started in 2001, "grew directly out of" DBN.^6, 3 Pen plotters take short commands with numbers telling them what to draw, as in HP-GL, much like DBN.