Polygonia: Symmetrical Pattern Designer

Provided by David Kaufman

I have been working on a project to make it easy to create symmetrical patterns for laser cutting. It all started in May 2017 when I visited the Smithsonian Museum, in Washington, D.C., where I saw an exhibit by an artisan from Afghanistan who made wood panels or screens of triangles, hexagons, and squares. I wanted to make my own using the laser cutter at Nova Labs. So I got out a pad of paper, brushed off my high school math skills, and got to work. My goal was to create an online app that first generates a symmetrical pattern based on the lines I draw, then calculates the intersection of the lines, connects them, and generates a vector output file that I could use on a laser cutter.

Five months later I had my first successful laser-cut design. Since then I have been adding more and more features. Adding different frame shapes. Adding curves. Fixing bugs. Originally everything had to be downloaded to be saved, but now the site also has cloud storage.

• Polygonia Design Suite: https://polygonia.design
• Polygonia via Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/PolygoniaDesigns/
• Hackaday Polygonia Blog post: https://hackaday.com/2019/03/08/polygonia-helps-you-laser-cut-beautiful-patterns/
• BoingBoing coverage: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/01/the-polygonia-design-suite-a.html