In August I took a break for updating and creating alphabetic fonts to play with
Tesselmanic! in an effort to create another tessellation font. With a lot of trial and error (mostly error), I was able to come up with over 40 designs that would fit into a typeface. I could not think of a clever name so settled for TessieSomeMore, indicating that it was a continuation of the
Tessie series of fonts.
As I played with the various templates in Tesselmaniac!, I found that sometimes I would create something quite similar to what I had done in the past. One example is shape that resembles a butterfly. Below is the most recent version.
Looking through past efforts, I found something quite similar in
TessieBugs. I kept the new version because it is so easily recognizable as an insect.
I noticed that if I added a straight segment where the wings touch, I could convert a tessellation that is IH68 to one that has six adjacent tiles and is type IH14.
Another insect design that resembles a past effort is this mite.
However, the old mite had six legs, so the new one is substantially different.
There are certain shapes that many people will stumble on if they play with tessellations enough.
Creating Escher-like pattern with the isohedral classification IH74 is challenging because there are not a lot of real-world objects that mirror both horizontally and vertically. Below is a stylized moth that fits the classification.
Again, the addition of a straight line where the wings touch turns it into a hexagonal figure. It retains all of its symmetry and is now IH17, another classification which is very difficult to use for Escher-like tessellations.
It is always exciting to find a new tessellating shape that is recognizable as an object. TessieSomeMore includes a shape recognizable as a toilet.
Another shape unlike any that I had previous found was one that resembles a creepy insect.
I tried to find interesting Escher-like tessellations in which the tile had two-fold rotational symmetry without mirror symmetry and came up empty. There are many real-world objects with reflective symmetry but very few with only rotational symmetry.
TessisSomeMore is available from
myfonts. On the page linked, there is a link to a file that includes samples of all the patterns included in the typeface.
