Mandeltot is a board-book project about the Mandelbrot set. The cover calls it “Abstract Math for Babies,” which is a pretty accurate description of what I was trying to make.
The book uses black, white, and red, with short lines of verse. You start with a shape, look closer, and find more shapes. There’s a lot to look at without having to explain any of the math first.
Start small. Keep looking.
The first spread calls the Mandelbrot small. The next says it isn’t. From there, the book moves through repeating forms and spirals before landing on a bedtime ending. The manuscript has seven interior spreads plus the cover.
The lettering follows the pictures, too. Some lines tilt into a curve; others move across the page. It’s a picture book, so the placement of a few words does a lot of the work.
One rule, a lot to look at.
The familiar Mandelbrot set comes from repeating a very small calculation. Pick a complex number c, start z at zero, and keep squaring z and adding c.
If the sequence stays bounded, c belongs to the set. If it escapes, it doesn’t. Repeating that test across a plane produces the boundary, with its recurring forms at smaller and smaller scales. The color bands are a way to draw the calculation; they aren’t extra ingredients in it. Wolfram MathWorld has the formal version.
That’s a good thing to put in front of someone who is still figuring out what the world looks like. No test at the end. Just something strange and beautiful to stare at together.
Of course there’s a book engine.
The production files include a small layout engine. Each spread has an image, dimensions, and text blocks with positions, type sizes, and rotations. A renderer builds the pages in HTML, and an export script turns them into high-resolution images for printing.
It lets the verse remain editable text while keeping the artwork and layout together. A small amount of software behind a very analog object.
