The cover for our new Type Annual issue was created by Jonathan Puckey using the drawing tool Scriptographer. Here's how he did it.

As this is our Type Annual issue, it was tempting to look at doing something for the cover based on traditional type-related crafts. But we just thought that was too obvious.

We've established something of a rule with our Annual issues, using the initial letter (P for Photography, I for Illustration etc) as the theme for the cover image. To create the T of our Type Annual cover, we turned to Scriptographer, a 'scripting' plug-in which works with Illustrator. Scriptographer, as its creator Jürg Lehni explains on the tool's web­site "allows the creation of mouse-controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones".

Mountain created using Scriptographer by ECAL students Daniel Bär, Guillaume Chuard and Arnaud Milliquet

Some examples of this are featured in this month's Monograph booklet (our subscriber-only extra publication) – the fruits of a series of Scriptographer workshops run by Lehni, his collaborator, the designer Jonathan Puckey, and students at the ECAL University of Design in Lausanne.

Dinosaur by Myriam Combier, Dimitris Dimoulitsas and Diego Thonney

By Ali-Eddine Abdelkhalek, Thomas Broquet, Pauline Piguet, Felix Salasca. See more in this month's Monograph

Puckey designed the CR cover using a new Scriptographer tool that he created called Triangular. "You place points with your mouse and the tool draws connecting lines between the points, as long as the lines don't overlap any existing lines," he explains. The resulting grid is coloured using the four colour theorem, which states that, given any separation of a plane into contiguous regions, no more than four colours are required to colour the regions of the plane so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour."

You can see how it works in this video.

If you'd like to have a go, the tool is now available to download, for free, from the Scriptographer site.