Divisions Study
I came across a generative art piece called Craticula while browsing r/generative. The piece uses two grids laid over one another, with one slightly rotated, creating a field of irregular shapes.
I liked the image immediately, but what really caught my attention was a comment underneath it:
“Would love to see an animated version where the rotated grid is sliding or spinning.”
That got me thinking less about reproducing the original and more about the basic idea of dividing a shape and moving the points where those divisions meet.
So I grabbed a pencil.
The sketch was just an attempt to figure out the movement. A square, a few points around its perimeter, and lines connecting them. What happens if those points travel around the outside of the square?
That became a quick animated prototype.
The prototype was enough to convince me there was something interesting there. The individual pieces constantly change proportion as the points move, but together they always resolve back into the same square.
From there I moved the idea into CodePen and built a single tile with controls. I experimented with the number of divisions, spacing, corner rounding, movement speed and easing. Adding a little bounce as the shapes settle gave the whole thing more life.
Once one tile was working, the obvious next step was to repeat it.
A lot.
Each tile follows the same basic system, but starts from different positions. The result sits somewhere between a geometric pattern and a collection of little mechanical organisms—everything following the same rules without everything doing exactly the same thing.
There wasn’t really a larger objective beyond that. I saw something that made me curious, drew an idea, made it move, and kept playing with it until it became something I liked.
That’s what the Lab is for.