Nanika was asked to design the June cover of Brain magazine, around the theme “Happy Creation”

We interpreted this as, how do we make ourselves as happy as possible while creating it?

I personally (Andreas) have been experimenting a bit with working in different locations like cafes and outside in the park, I find it makes it easier for me to get into ’the creative zone’ and I’m also interested in the idea of being productive on an iPad.

By iPad we don’t specifically mean the Apple iPad, but this new generation of touch devices in general. The multitouch-on-a-tablet format is a super interesting step forward of the kind we haven’t seen for a while.

So there was this vision of being able to do the whole thing start to finish from a cafe or a bar on an iPad, for the final creation process to feel a bit futuristic.

This is obviously more of a performance art approach to it all as there is a lot of work to be done to be able to get to that moment when you can sit down at a cafe for a few hours and produce good imagery!

So we set out to make an iOS app that somehow could produce really beautiful imagery at print resolutions, ideally it would run on a phone as well so that we could make/explore images whenever a moment was free.

A lot of the projects that we work on involve creating a system that produces images, motion, reaction and exposing the various parameters in the system in such a way that other people can bring their skills and experience to the project and change the system. Being surprised by something you made and know intimately is a great feeling.

The process would be to use this App to make/look for a beautiful image, then take the image into Photoshop Touch to do framing and colour correction. Photoshop Touch on iPad supports images up to 4096×4096 now, so that’s fortunate.

As we were thinking about what do and generally looking around for inspiration and knowledge to use we came across this lovely piece of open source code by Tom Beddard describing a 3D fractal called a Mandelbulb and we knew there would be a lot of beautiful images in there to explore.

A few days later we had an early version of an application that let us explore the shape, the first time it running on a phone was very exciting, we were really living the theme “Happy Creation”.

Julia is available for download at: http://appstore.com/nanika/julia