When it comes to keeping in touch, most people email, Facebook message, or perhaps they go the traditional and seemingly forgotten route of sending a postcard or letter. Artist Matthias Dörfelt has gone above and beyond with I Follow, series of computer generated flip books created for people Matthias wanted to keep in touch with. The books show a creature chasing a balloon through a landscape. Although randomly generated, each recipient was treated to a different balloon and call noise based on the specific person.

I Follow was created using PaperJS. From within itself, the program was able to generate all the different features of the drawings, i.e., various presets for animation and renderings of assorted body parts and scenery that imitated Matthias’s hand drawn marks. The files were eventually converted to PDFs and the books were printed on a Canon desktop printer then finally cut and bound using a simple binding technique.

The trippy, wonderfully strange little creatures seem so personalized that it’s difficult to comprehend they were randomly generated using a computer program. And, as we've seen before, the combination of technology and physical flip books, is mesmerizing.