An impending wedding meant thinking about a new tie. Of course I couldn’t do simple…
So my brother got married. I’m not sure who is more shocked. But clearly an event that required some effort on my behalf. For reasons known only to my subconcious I’d fixated on a tie with a mandelbrot fractal pattern on it. Perhaps it’s just how my head works but I’d assumed this would be a fairly common design available with a bit of search around Next etal. But nope. Menswear is dead boring.
So a custom job it was going to be using Bags of Love. They provide an online design tool for you to provide the graphics into a tie-shaped-space and they produce and ship the item.
For a decent result this was going to require some interestingly sized images - a front at 1313x9958 @ 300dpi and a tail at 674x8858 @ 300dpi. While there are plenty of Mandelbrot set viewers available online they seemed able to only provide images at browser window dimensions and without sufficient color control.
Which is a long introduction to compiling some code to display and save Mandelbrot images. The code was cobbled from eobermuhlner on github into my own local project. The build was using gradle, which I’m not familiar with but it wasn’t too tricky to get everything to build and run without having to actually alter code. Find some interesting locations, specify the dimensions and save the required images.
Being me, I’d left this all a bit last minute. Compiled the code and submitted the design on Sunday for a wedding the next weekend but qudos to Bags of Love, it arrived Thursday and is impressive and perfect.
The wedding was lovely with an obviously very happy brother and the weather held for the photos, so a major bonus. The only downside was nobody commented “isnt that a Mandelbrot fractal?”