I did the cover for the April issue of Communications of the ACM and a few illustrations inside as well.

CACM Readers: for more Structure Synth pictures see either my personal Flickr account or the public Structure Synth pool. If you want to try out the program for youself, it is freely available from SourceForge.

The structures were created in Structure Synth, and raytraced in SunFlow in high resolution (the largest picture was 6000×6000 pixels).

I was about to leave for Japan, when I was asked to make the cover image, so I had a very tight deadline. Despite this, the actual work process went fine, thanks to clear artistic guidance from the graphical editor (Alicia Kubista from Andrij Borys Associates).

By the way, even though the cover notes state that I’m a computer scientist, and even though I’ve worked professionally with software development for the last eight years or so, I am a physicist. Really.