Distance changes everything.

FLAKE, built by Kyiv-based designer Anatolii Babii, uses a simple principle to generate complex results: measure how far each point is from the center of a tile, then let that distance drive everything else. Scale, color, rotation. The technique is borrowed from signed distance functions, a staple of shader programming. You get symmetrical patterns, generative textures, and a surprising amount of control over how ordered or chaotic the output feels.

The tool ships with a library of geometric shapes, but the real flexibility comes from drag-and-drop. Throw an SVG onto the canvas and FLAKE adapts it into the pattern immediately. Icons, glyphs, abstract forms. You can also drop in raster images as masks, where brightness and transparency modulate how shapes scale and distribute across the grid. There's a swirl transformation mode, blend modes, customizable color palettes, and a randomization engine for when you want to explore without deciding. Animation runs on simplex noise, smoothly shifting size and color in loops you can export as MP4 or frame sequences. For print work, SVG export keeps everything vector.

Babii has spent years building tools like this, each one a self-contained experiment in procedural graphics. His work has shipped through Adobe, Nike, Wired, and Ogilvy, but the tools themselves feel more like a public workshop than client deliverables. FLAKE runs on p5.js, with Tweakpane handling the interface. Thirty presets are included to get you started, and you can save your own configurations, custom shapes and masks included, as JSON files to reload later.