One Maze - Many designs - Final recap

At the beginning of the year I decided to try a maze design experiment where I take one maze and then design it in as many ways I can think of. I also kept finding new filters to use in the software I design in, Inkscape. I also mixed in a bit of text to image AI to see how it fared. This is my recap of the experiment.

We start with the original maze:

Simple Maze

I ended up making 125 variations of this maze of the course of 25 blog posts. I pulled them together into 5 groups of 25 so you can see them all. If the structure lost the maze…it is probably AI generated.

What I learned during this experiment:

  • Inkscape is full of filters and you will never know what they do unless you experiment with them.

  • There sure are a lot of filters that distort whatever image you make.

  • As I learned in other experiments, Text to Image AI is not able to keep the maze structure while adding design themes to it.

  • The color combinations you can use are infinite and I think color is the most impactful I think.

  • I really enjoy playing with depths and shadow. Some of my favorite mazes were the shadow and rotation ones I made.

  • I found that I like to use this post for inspiration and reference when I am designing new mazes. Feel free to do the same !

  • After a time it becomes difficult to come up with new ideas. Then you come with ideas that take a long time to create. I am sure with enough time and effort I could make 200+ more variations, but I was ready to move on to other things.

I was going to pick my favorite mazes - but it changes depending on my mood. Hopefully you can find a favorite !

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One Maze - Many designs - experiment #25

This is a continuation of my maze design experiments. Read about it in post #1, One Maze - Many designs, and so on with a new post every Friday. This will be the last official maze compilation after 25 weeks I am running out of time and ideas. I will wrap this up with one final blog post to talk about what I learned.

The original maze:

Simple Maze

I did a few variations of previous themes as a last gasp of inspiration.

  • The first maze was a leftover I never used from Bing image generator. I uploaded my original maze and used the preset button to create a sketch version of it. Not sure why it included people.

  • The second maze I used stacked rainbow boxes in the background. As I learned before - the distraction actually makes the maze more difficult to solve because it tricks your eyes.

  • The third maze uses an Inkscape filter called growing cells.

  • The fourth maze is the black maze on a dark charcoal background.

  • The fifth maze has a background of a large red dot.

Another hodge-podge of mazes.

One Maze - Many designs - experiment #24

This is a continuation of my maze design experiments. Read about it in post #1, One Maze - Many designs, and so on with a new post every Friday.

The original maze:

Simple Maze

I like to have themes with my designs….until I don’t and this week I do not. These are all leftovers that I made during other experiments, so the theme this week is grab bag !

  • The first maze was part of my outer wall experiments. For this one I tried to make the outer wall expand like it was a balloon being blown up. I was not a fan so I left it in the folder. Today it escapes.

  • The second maze was also part of that project and features a zig zagging outer wall. Eh.

  • The third maze features thick black walls that I blurred so the pathways went from white to grey. I thought it would be cooler. This is why I experiment.

  • The fourth maze is Gemini generated based on the original maze being made into a hedge maze. You can see the general shape well. I like the image even if it is not perfect.

  • The fifth maze is an outer wall variation that has a shadow. I was just playing around. This has possibilites.

The best of this group to me is the Gemini image, otherwise nothing too special.

One Maze - Many designs - experiment #23

This is a continuation of my maze design experiments. Read about it in post #1, One Maze - Many designs, and so on with a new post every Friday.

The original maze:

Simple Maze

I played with color and a bit of blurry lines this week.

  • For the first maze is blurry white maze on a black background.

  • The second maze I wanted to make difficult to see. A lightly colored maze on a white background.

  • The third maze is blue on blue, again trying to blend the maze into the background a bit.

  • The fourth maze I did the contrast of yellow on red for a comparison to the other versions.

  • The fifth maze is pink on pink, again blurry.

I was just playing with color here a bit. The blurry lines help to blend the maze into the background. I wanted 4 of these to be subtle based on the the color combinations.