Spirograph

A tiny mathematical toy for making pretty things.

Remember those little plastic Spirograph sets where you could spend an unreasonable amount of time making increasingly complicated geometric doodles?

I made a digital one. 

SPIROGRAPH is a just-for-fun interactive toy where you can play with rolling gears, mathematical curves, and a frankly unnecessary amount of neon glow.

Drag around the canvas and watch your virtual gear trace out a pattern — or sit back and let Auto Draw do the work for you.

✧ Make Your Own Patterns

Experiment with:

• Ring Size (R) — change the size of the fixed ring
• Gear Size (r) — change the size of the rolling gear
• Pen Offset (d) — move the drawing point around the gear
• Inside / Outside Ring — switch between hypotrochoid and epitrochoid-style patterns
• Line Weight — make your patterns delicate or chunky
• Color — pick from a little neon color palette
• Neon Glow — because obviously
• Auto Draw Speed — slow and hypnotic or fast and chaotic

The control panel even shows the simplified R:r ratio and how many loops it takes for the pattern to close.

✧ Or Just Hit Randomize

Don't feel like figuring out the math?

Hit 🎲 Randomize and let the machine pick a combination of ring size, gear size, pen position, and color for you.

Some combinations make elegant geometric patterns.

Some make absolute nonsense.

That's part of the fun.

✧ Save Your Creations

Made something particularly pretty?

Hit Save PNG and your pattern will be exported as an image.

✧ A Tiny Math Toy

Underneath all the glowing pixels, this thing is actually doing some neat mathematics.

The curves are generated from the equations for a point attached to a gear rolling around the inside or outside of a circle. Small changes to the relationship between the ring and gear sizes can produce dramatically different patterns.

So if you're the kind of person who sees a pretty geometric doodle and immediately thinks:

"Wait... why does it do that?"

...you might enjoy this. 💜

✦ No Objective. No Score. Just Gears.

This isn't really a game.

It's a little digital playground I made because I thought Spirographs are neat, and I wanted to see what would happen if I turned one into an interactive neon mathematical toy.

So poke the buttons.

Drag the gear around.

Press Randomize approximately 700 times.

Make something pretty.

Have fun. ✨