Snowflake

A fun idea I came up with for the current wintry season. This snowflake has been built using a kaleidoscope effect, where art and shapes in one quadrant of the canvas has been mirrored across the other 3 quadrants to produce 4-way symmmetry.

A nested SVG shape with a 400x400 unit viewBox is placed within the 850x1100 unit primary SVG that makes up the final output canvas. Anything that goes within this nested SVG will appeared flipped horizontally in the upper-right quadrant, mirrored vertically down into the lower-left quadrant, and flipped and mirrored over into the lower-right quadrant. Anything that goes beyond the bounds of the nested SVG viewBox will not get rendered.

Use elements with transforms are used to produce the mirror effect, and more Use elements are in the nested SVG itself to copy and rotate the spars that make up the main body of the snowflake. Circles and other paths make up the "cutout" shapes that give the snowflake more definition and tactile complexity.

Feel free to clear out all the shapes in the nested "main" SVG element and pop in your own shapes to create fun, symmetrical tactile graphics!

Download the Snowflake SVG file