Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper

by alevskaya • 7 years ago

386 27 7 years ago

abathur2• 7 years ago

Watched most of the demo with my permanent roommate (an architect) before dinner and we both found it interesting. Good work.

samstave• 7 years ago

What is a "Permanent Roommate"?

abathur2• 7 years ago

Just a cheeky term for my life partner :)

countername• 7 years ago

it's a pleasure to play with it

cairo_x• 7 years ago

This is excellent!

lainga• 7 years ago

If I press "Grid Adjust", I think it stops the preset grid choices from applying afterward

sabujp• 7 years ago

the autogenerated rolled paper is nice : https://www.zazzle.com/eschersketch_wrapping_paper-256519193...

CodeWriter23• 7 years ago

Great name.

rkagerer• 7 years ago

One of the most enjoyable HN Show and Tells I've clicked in a while, thanks!

h00dui• 7 years ago

This is lovely, many thanks for sharing. I am having a lot of fun with this & will most likely use this for some art related things in the future. I'd love to be able to export these & have the same view I have via the browser. Seems that exporting picture will give me some extra space on the right with different gray space etc. Still love it, many thanks.

stuntkite• 7 years ago

This is awesome. Better execution than most web based tools I've seen to do similar. I'm fascinated by Escher's migrating tessellations of recognizable figures[0]. It would be nice to fork this and be able to draw a pair (or more) of figures then use a gradient to base a blending mask to sum them.

[0] https://mathstat.slu.edu/escher/index.php/Tessellations_by_R...

ddsea2• 7 years ago

Reproducing one of Escher's works, even approximately, would likely make a killer demo for this.

gitgud• 7 years ago

Very nice and fluid, also great to be able to instantly buy the pattern in wrapping paper.

The only things I would recommend are:

- The help screen in the beginning, doesn't look like a modal. It took me ages to actually figure out there was an "x" button in the top-right. Maybe add a darken behind the help popup, to show that it can be exited.

- "Show Grid-lines" should be a first class option. I couldn't easily find out how to show grid-lines and without you're clicking in the dark to find where the pattern begins and ends.

These are just some small UX improvements, overall it's an impressive tool and I wish you all the best!

glaberficken• 7 years ago

Also, the way the trash can icon works is way non standard. I applaud the attempt of getting rid of a standard confirmation modal, but when introducing novel UI like this you need to be more explicit.

Suggestion: - make the prompt appear inside the trash button and not outside it. That should be enough to make it more obvious. If not enough, then add a small text to it.

like this maybe:

[(Trash)Reset?]

pvinis• 7 years ago

A friend of mine has made https://patternjs.com/ but Eschersketch one is way more interactive!

benenglish• 7 years ago

Great software but after clicking buy and seeing that the Zazzle want to charge £37 for a roll of custom wrapping paper? haha. the economics deem this ridiculous!! You can buy great wrapping paper at a craft store for £3 a roll...

alevskaya• 7 years ago

Hey - author here, that price does seem high - I don't remember it being that much... the only reason I linked to Zazzle at all was that they were the only printer at the time offering a simple API for single-button forwarding of image data. I'm sure there are cheaper services out there, which is why you can download the 'tile' image that should work with any decent printing service, or SVG for more customization, etc.

bpick• 7 years ago

Does anyone have any recommendations for a better, more economically reasonable printing service than Zazzle? The sheer cost of it is prohibitively expensive, and makes it tough to imagine small businesses or artists being able to afford using their service.

adrianoconnor• 7 years ago

This is really nice, good work!

I once made a similar thing, but it was more of a creative-play-thing for children (so no way to create tiled graphics, but hopefully easy to use and fun to play with). It is at: http://kaleidopaint.com/

ddsea2• 7 years ago

Like in a kaleidoscope, almost anything looks much better with symmetry. Doodling on industrial scale. Great job!

mkl• 7 years ago

This looks neat! Two improvements I'd suggest are icons for the symmetry choices rather than (or as well as) technical names, and pressure sensitivity via Pointer Events.

pgreenwood• 7 years ago

Looks great! A fair bit more functionality than similar apps. I'd love to see an option to use orbifold notation as well as crystalographic.

GistNoesis• 7 years ago

Hello nice work but I'm afraid there is a critical bug when varying the grid size. I'm not sure you can output a tile image when using simultaneously two various grid sizes, as the periodic tiled image then should be of size greatest common multiplier of the grids size.

What you see is not what you get. https://eschersket.ch/s/52e60da7c86c26cecc6b59bb7f9de9ad

Try to see the tiled image or exported to zazzle, and lines are no longer continuous :( (By the way I also just notice sharing a zazzle url like : https://www.zazzle.com/eschersketch_wrapping_paper-256519193... is problematic because it is very tempting for the user to do so, but everyone is sharing the same link, and what is displayed have some caching issues), (Zazzle also gives a warning when the image is too big, Zazzle is also really expensive 33€ for 76cm x 1.80m)

If you can sort the above issues, you can probably easily add some fractals symmetries :)

kauegimenes• 7 years ago

What you guys think? https://www.zazzle.com/api/create/at-238457573239445416?rf=2...

vectorEQ• 7 years ago

this is super nice :D

yenwel• 7 years ago

thanks so much! my wife is a teacher in ceramics so this is superusefull for her...

xkef• 7 years ago

amazing work! very creative - keep it up :)

Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper

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