LAB / 08

Maze to Clarity

Type a word. It fills with a dense maze pattern, then the maze resolves outward from a single point until it settles into clean, solid letters. A small study of the same idea that shows up in a lot of my actual work: complexity that looks chaotic up close often has a real structure underneath, and clarity is usually a process, not a single reveal.

experiment

What this is

Each letter is sampled into a grid, then a real maze-generation algorithm (randomized depth-first search, the same one used for actual maze puzzles) carves a path through every cell inside the letterforms. Disconnected shapes, like the dot on an "i", get their own separate maze. Resolving the word fills cells outward from the maze's own starting point, in the order it was originally carved.

What I learned

The disconnected shapes (the dot on an "i", the hole in an "o") took more thought than the maze algorithm itself. Same pattern as most of my design work: the main path is usually the easy part, the edge cases are where the real decisions live.