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The "algorithm" is called HP Mosaic and is included free in HP SmartStream Designer for HP printers.

It was first used in a Coke marketing campaign in 2014 ...

http://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/extraordinary-collec...

More about how the algorithm works here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hp-mosaic-20-steven-chow

> HP Mosaic takes the vector PDF file as input (also known as a Seed file), and generates a large number of variations on the file by transforming it — scaling, transposition, and rotation — randomly.

Okay, that's a little disappointing—I was hoping for some sort of image generation, rather than just cropping. But the output still looks good, so I'm not going complain too loudly.

I'm somewhat disappointed that they just used a feature in a consumer program to do this. I expected it to be some "collaboration", ala " ferrero x hp ".

I don't think it detracts from the creative achievement. The designer still has to know how to use the tool properly and make good choices for the patterns and colors.

But yeah, the headline is silly. It's the equivalent of "Vogue hired an algorithm to touch up new photos of models."

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