PhD Thesis Cover Design 🎨
🎄🎁 Advent of Open Source – Day 14/24: An open-source project for designing personalized thesis covers using Python.
(See my intro post)
When most people think of open source, they think of software. But what about open-sourcing your PhD thesis and creating a generative art system for its cover?
📖 Origin Story
With my PhD defense approaching and needing around 100 copies of my thesis, I faced a design challenge. As someone more comfortable with Python than Photoshop, I turned what started as a simple visualization idea into a full-blown generative art project with machine learning-based clustering.
🔧 Technical Highlights
- Generated 3,671 unique covers from quantum physics simulation data
- Used VGG16 neural network to extract features from covers
- Implemented K-means clustering to group similar designs
- Created interactive IPywidgets for design selection
- Built a Binder app for real-time color scheme adjustment
- Added unique edition numbers (1/120, 2/120, etc.)
- Made both thesis and cover design code fully open source
The project combines:
- Adaptive sampling for physics simulations
- Neural networks for image feature extraction
- Interactive visualization tools
- Parallel processing for batch generation
- Version control for scientific writing
📊 Impact
- Thesis repository: 14 GitHub stars
- Cover design repository: 36 GitHub stars
- Real-world adoption: Dr. Tomas Pippia from TU Delft used the code to create his own thesis cover
- ~100 unique printed copies, each with its own generated cover and edition number
🎯 Challenges and Solutions
- Managing 3,671 unique PDF files and their conversions
- Creating a clustering system for visually similar designs
- Building interactive tools for non-technical collaborators
- Ensuring consistent print quality across designs
- Balancing artistic appeal with scientific relevance
💡 Lessons Learned
- Open source isn’t just about code - it’s about sharing knowledge
- Python can be a powerful tool for creative projects
- Machine learning can help solve unexpected problems
- Good visualization requires both technical skill and artistic sense
- Interactive tools make collaboration with non-programmers easier
📚 Fun Fact
Due to COVID restrictions, I defended my thesis without any guests present. The silver lining? I still have about 100 beautifully unique copies at home, each with a different generated cover and edition number. If you’d like a physical copy of this piece of quantum physics meets generative art, just let me know!
Want to create your own thesis cover or see how I wrote mine? Check out the thesis cover project and thesis source!
#OpenSource #PhD #Python #MachineLearning #DataVisualization
