For this mandala, I added two kinds of trees. The first kind is all lines. Like a tree during stick season. It makes a good base for a snowflake. The second kind I call leafy tree. Simple sticks with leaves at the end of each branch. I wanted the combination of snowflake and trees and dots to have a winter holiday feeling.
Big update with this mandala. I've added a control panel for changing the mandala. Users can now change the shapes and their size, color, angle and distance from the center. These changes are impermanent. At some point I'll add the ability to save your changes and edit the underlying data. But for now, experiment and have fun!
My last mandala moved the data structure that defines the mandala from client side javascript to server side python. Here, the text (this text) and the title are also in serverside python. This keeps all the post specific changes in one place (e.g. mandala17.py), standardizes the html for a post, and is a step towards moving the post text and data into a database.
I'm still making mandalas that are fun for me. But this mandala is the first one that is built from a dataset that was generated in Python on the server. This is a big milestone towards making them into data visualizations that describe datasets.
This mandala looks similar to the last one. But, to draw that one, the browser uses html that describes 3,720 elements. To draw this one, the browser uses html that describes 16 elements. The software now draws the mandala into an image, then uses that image 16 times. This will help performance in the future when we want to represent a large amount of data. The software will be able to zoom in and out of mandalas that represent clusters of data.