Diatoms

While playing with the paper.js rotation examples I was struck by the intricacy of repeated circles and wanted to explore it further. They brought to mind the geometric patterns of the centric variety of diatoms. What resulted is also somewhat reminiscent of the output of a spirograph, but admittedly less intricate.

Each canvas below is made up of circles repeated with varying radiuses. Every time you open the page a new set of patterns are generated. You can generate a different number of patterns with the num query parameter (like this!), or get a permanent-ish link for this specific iteration.

You can also interact with them a little more with a browser's web developer tools (usually opened with F12 or CTRL-SHIFT-I on a laptop/desktop).