Generative Art

Patterns that grow from a few rules, whether the rules come from chemistry, physics, algorithms or centuries of craft. Everything is computed live in your browser: tune the parameters, watch it change, and download the result.

Simulations

Nature's patterns from simple rules: vibrating sand, ice, currents, chaos, chemistry, fractals and the sunflower.

Cymatics

Play a frequency and watch the sand settle into its Chladni figure, on a plate or a drumhead.

Snowflake Grower

Grow snow crystals on a hexagonal grid with Reiter's cellular automaton: set the humidity and frost to get dendrites, ferns, plates or lace.

Flow Fields

Thousands of particles follow Perlin noise and draw its invisible currents, like ink in water.

Strange Attractors

Draw the Lorenz butterfly and other strange attractors from tens of millions of points of their chaotic orbits, as glowing long exposures.

Reaction-Diffusion

Grow Turing patterns (spots, stripes, coral, worms, waves) from the Gray-Scott model in real time, paint with chemicals and download the pattern.

Infinite Coastlines

An interactive guide to the coastline paradox and fractal dimension: shrinking rulers, the Koch snowflake and the Mandelbrot set.

Sunflower Golden Angle

Grow a sunflower from the golden angle, nudge it a tenth of a degree to see spokes appear, and count its Fibonacci spirals.

Curves and mazes

Paths drawn by algorithms and pendulums.

Maze Maker

Square, circular, triangular and heart-shaped mazes from seven algorithms, to solve with the keyboard or a finger and export as SVG or PNG.

Labyrinth Maker

Draw the Cretan labyrinth, a Troy Town or your own design from its path sequence, then walk it to the center.

Harmonograph Maker

Musical intervals drawn by pendulums: harmonograph spirals and Lissajous curves for the octave.

Spiral Gallery

The logarithmic, Archimedean, Fermat and Fibonacci spirals side by side, with the nautilus, the ram's horn and the galaxy.

Patterns from traditions

The rules of artisans, from Islamic tilings to Japanese lattices, rebuilt as generators.

Islamic Patterns

Stars, rosettes and interlaced girih grown from tilings of polygons with Hankin's method, saved as SVG or PNG.

Kolam Maker

South Indian dot-grid designs where a single unbroken line loops around every dot. Watch it being drawn, in one stroke.

Celtic Knot Maker

Paint breaks on a grid and the knotwork weaves itself, over and under, with George Bain's method.

Rose Window Maker

Build Gothic tracery with compass and straightedge, step by step, like a medieval mason.

Kumiko Maker

The Japanese wooden lattice: asanoha, goma and kikkō patterns, assembled piece by piece in a square, hexagonal or round frame.

Sashiko Maker

Japanese running-stitch patterns, white thread on indigo: seigaiha waves, asanoha, shippō and more, stitched out line by line.

Sacred geometry and Zen

Circles, triangles and symmetry, drawn to scale or by hand.