L-systems perfectly illustrate how massive visual complexity can be mathematically derived from a handful of discrete axioms.
It’s a core mental model. When building generative systems, the designer's job fundamentally shifts from manually drawing the final shape to strictly engineering the initial recursive rules. A design system that cannot be expressed as a recursive function is usually just arbitrary styling, not a true system.
This author is really prolific in the Julia visualization ecosystem. One of my favorite projects from them is actually quite useful outside Julia: a super minimal but slick Unicode character lookup, glyphy.info.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadIt’s a core mental model. When building generative systems, the designer's job fundamentally shifts from manually drawing the final shape to strictly engineering the initial recursive rules. A design system that cannot be expressed as a recursive function is usually just arbitrary styling, not a true system.