Ben Fry
/ projects
/ writing
/ genetics
/ about
Books
Casey and I wrote Getting Started with Processing as a short and inexpensive guide to writing code for beginners and non-programmers. The book is heavy on examples and designed to get folks started quickly. It's propaganda material to get people hooked on coding: before long they're pursuing careers as artists or computer scientists, or worse yet, creating new programming languages to get others coding, thus repeating the cycle.
News
This site has not received regular updates for a long time. It was designed in 2008, a milder time with smaller screen sizes and no mobile devices.
The content is primarily an archive from 1998–2010.
New work is at Fathom.
The content is primarily an archive from 1998–2010.
New work is at Fathom.
23 July 10
The official launch of Fathom, and a new site to go with it. (Most future updates will be happening there, rather than here...)
23 September 09
Interview at Rhizome on the release of Processing 1.0.
2 May 09
10 March 09
Announcing my new post as director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab.
5 May 08
Illustration comparing DNA of humans and a dozen mammals prepared for Seed Magazine.
30 April 08
Two from October 2005: Illustration comparing DNA of Humans vs. Chimps, and a cover for Nature, celebrating the first phase of the HapMap project.
29 April 08
From October 2006, an update to disarticulate for the Cooper-Hewitt
28 April 08
December work: Sketches for an illustration of the Enron email data set
28 April 08
Old work: Illustration for William Safire's On Language column in the New York Times Magazine
24 April 08
New work: All Streets, a compilation of 26 million segments of road
24 April 08
Salary vs. Performance updated for the 2008 season
24 March 08
Interview about Processing at AdAge.
4 March 08
Finally, a new web site!
24 February 08
Redesigned diagram of the genetic code, including an interactive version
5 May 07
Salary vs. Performance sketch updated for 2007 season
20 April 07
Celebrating the one year anniversary since an update.. sorry, more soon
19 April 06
salary vs. performance sketch updated for 2006 season
10 April 06
Quick illustration for New York Magazine's high priority feature
20 February 06
Two illustrations for a New York Magazine cover story about blogs
31 October 05
Isometricblocks depicting the HapMap on the cover of Nature
31 October 05
A poster (PDF) about the HapMap project for Genome Research
Talks 2010–2013
Events and lectures after 2013 are updated on this page.
June 2013
Eyeo Festival lecture
3 April 2013
W. A. Dwiggins Lecture at the Boston Public Library for the Society of Printers
26 March 2013
Lecture at The University of Utah
1 March 2013
Data visualization panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
May 2013
AIGA Boston lecture
17 January 2013
Keynote at CUSEC in Montreal
27 July 2012
Keynote at the Association of Medical Illustrators annual conference in Toronto
6 June 2012
Eyeo Festival lecture
13–15 April 2012
Michigan State / East Lansing talk/event/workshop
3 April 2012
Lecture for UCLA's Design|Media Arts program
25–26 January 2012
Lecture at Savannah College of Art and Design
14 December 2011
Speaking at the IS&T colloquium at NASA Goddard
17–19 November 2011
Visiting designer and workshop at RISD
11–13 November 2011
Processing + Android event at the UIC
3 October 2011
Lecture at The New York Times.
28 September 2011
Speaking at the first Boston Data Visualization event about Recent Work & Processing 2.0
12–13 September 2011
White House Luncheon for the National Design Awards
8 September 2011
Visualization workshop at Bloomberg
4 August 2011
Lecture at the Big Data Forum event at GE Research
27–29 June 2011
Speaking at the Eyeo Festival
19 May 2011
Speaking at “Data visualizations: Using data to explain the world around us” meet up event for Hacks & Hackers Boston. (Open to the public!)
6 May 2011
Keynote at the Donaghue Foundation's design thinking conference
19–21 April 2011
Speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference
13 April 2011
Lecture with Casey Reas at Princeton University (video)
4 April 2011
Lecture at Hanspeter Pfister's CS 171 Visualization course at Harvard
4 March 2011
Opening for a mural project (in collaboration with Casey Reas) at MIT's new Koch Institute building
20–26 February 2011
Lecture for Design Indaba, in Cape Town, South Africa
30 Nov – 9 Dec 2010
Lectures and workshops in both Brisbane and Melbourne as part of the YOW! conference in Australia
22 October 2010
Keynote for the Connecting the Dots symposium on network visualization at Harvard University
14 October 2010
Speaking to an Editorial Institute course at Boston University
6 October 2010
Lecture at Georgia Tech
1–3 October 2010
Processing for Android mobile summit event at UIC in Chicago
24–27 August 2010
Lecture and visualization workshop at UX Week in San Francisco
17–19 August 2010
23 June 2010
Invited talk at the USENIX Annual Conference in Boston
9 June 2010
Online "data science" talk, more details here.
1–2 May 2010
Attending Foo East in Cambridge, MA
22 April 2010
Speaking at Columbia
20 April 2010
At Harvard GSD
9 April 2010
Joining John Resig, Chris Blizzard, Dave Humphrey, and Corban Brook for Processing.js Panel 2010.
5 April 2010
Lecture for Hanspeter Pfister's course at Harvard.
31 March 2010
IIC colloquium lecture at Harvard.
16 March 2010
Panel at SXSW organized by Casey Caplowe, with Shan Carter and Eric Rodenbeck.
3–5 March 2010
Keynote presentation for EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi) in Heidelberg, Germany.
22 February 2010
Lecture at Columbia University
Talks 2007–2009
18 November 2009
Lecture at Stanford.
21–22 September 2009
Transparent Text symposium at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA.
9–13 September 2009
Participating in a debate/panel on the 12th for Experimenta Design in Lisbon, Portgual.
15–16 July 2009
Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics Into Knowledge in Washington, D.C.
18 June 2009
Panel presentation for
State of Innovation summit in conjunction with the Council on Competitiveness
18 June 2009
Lecture and visualization workshop for the Future of News and Civic Media conference at MIT.
2–3 June 2009
Processing talk at Creativity and Technology in New York.
13 May 2009
Visiting critic for Yale graduate design.
5 May 2009
Lecture for the Western MA Developers group in Northampton, Massachusetts.
29 April 2009
Keynote for the New Horizons conference at the University of Virginia.
22–24 April 2009
Lecture and workshop at a Joined Up Ecology event in the UK.
3–4 April 2009
Lecture about Processing (and workshop the following day) at the Flourish open source conference in Chicago.
1 April 2009
Lecture at U-Mass Lowell.
18 March 2009
Lecture in Boston for Northeastern University's ACM chapter.
7–9 March 2009
Art and Code conference in Pittsburgh (open to the public, modest fee to participate in workshops). I'll be doing a pair of visualization workshops on Saturday, and lecturing about Processing with Casey on Sunday.
11 December 2008
Evening lecture for the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM.
10 – 12 November 08
Visiting designer at MSCD in Denver
October 08
Banned from travel
24 September 08
Speaking at Harvard Applied Statistics Workshop
18 – 21 September 08
Processing pow-wow at Miami University (Ohio)
June – September 08
The Summer of Processing 1.0
21 August 08
iCORE Summit 08 in Banff
20 May 08
Lecture at New Horizons conference in Virginia (UVA) Appearance canceled due to travel problems.
16 May 08
Processing lecture at MIT CSAIL
2 May 08
Speaking at Williams College
28 April 08
Visualization lecture for a Harvard course
19 April 08
SEE Conference in Wiesbaden, Germany
11 April 08
Lecture at UNC Asheville
28 March 08
Audio interview with Dr. Dobb's Journal about Data Visualization and Processing
24 February – 12 May 08
Pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMA (and several Processing-based projects from others too!)
22 February 08
Pecha Kucha Boston 03
21 February 08
Visit a class and lecture at Smith College
28 September 07–6 January 08
Processing travels with the National Design Triennial to the ICA Boston
13 December 07
ICA/AIGA Design Series: Chip Kidd, Ben Fry, Toshiko Mori hosted by Ellen Lupton (canceled due to weather)
14 – 28 November 07
Visualizar workshop in Madrid
28 September 07
Processing talk for PICNIC Festival in Amsterdam
21 September 07
Simply Science Simply Design symposium in Sunderland
6 September 07
Keynote at Ignite Boston, an open event sponsored by O'Reilly
30 August–3 September 2007
Workshop and Conference in Copenhagen.
6 February–6 April 2007
Data Poïesis exhibition at Anderson Ranch
5 February 2007
On public radio talking about digital billboards