I’ve started a new project recently. A pattern block designer written in Java 7. Yes, in spite of all the other projects I have yet to start ;-).
My mom gave my son a box of mis-matched pattern blocks that were left over from her classroom. Anyway, he’s not really old enough to “get” making designs on his own yet, but I figured he loves puzzles and matching shapes and colors isn’t too hard for him, so I started looking for some designs online of concrete objects drawn in pattern blocks, like a train, for example, since he’s really into trains.
But while the first site I found a bunch of animal designs had nice high quality printable PDFs, the second site (which had some cool designs like rockets and trains) had a word document with upscaled screenshots from a java applet. It was quite low resolution (like 32 pixels per inch instead of 300 pixels per inch…and no amount of anti-aliasing is going to make up for that), and the geometry of two of the shapes was just a little bit off for the sake of convenience. It just didn’t look very good printed. And there weren’t a lot of other free or instant-download alternatives.
So I decided to redraw a couple of those designs in Corel Draw, and set out creating isometric guidelines and measuring all the real pattern blocks with a ruler and compass to make sure I had the scale correct and everything before I created shape templates. And while the finished product didn’t look bad, I kept getting frustrated with how much simpler it “ought to be” to do this, mentally designing how it ought to work.
So that’s pretty much my inspiration for deciding to start this project. And just for fun, here’s one of my corel draw animal designs as a low quality gif image…and you can see a couple of my points of frustration trying to get the geometry to line up perfectly…even with the “snap” options in corel draw.
