I have been waiting for this assignment since last semester. I remember standing in front of the wall where all the projects were displayed, and looking around and just saying to myself “huh, I think I would do a bee/beehive themed one if that were my word” and it just stuck!
I’ve had the idea clearly displayed in my mind since then, and I’m so happy that I got to do it.

It was a little more complicated that I had anticipated though. I pretty quickly managed to import a block font that I liked, convert the font to paths and convert those to polygons. From there, I created a function that draws hexagons, and plotted out a grid used a nested for loop through the entire canvas. After that, it’s basically saying that if the polygon of my letters contains the x,y being plotted by the nested for loop, draw a hexagon. Simple!

From there, I needed to figure out the offset of the hexagons to actually make it look like a honeycomb. Lucky for me, Mathura and her lovely husband Hari were in the shop, and they came to my rescue (as they always do when it involves code). We started talking and the logic is basically to offset every other row of hexagons so that we can arrange them in the way that the honeycomb. I had the right idea, as I was using a modulo operator for this, but not exactly in the right way. We fudged around with it a bit and after getting it almost right, we pulled out all the stops and got down with some MATH.

We figured out the specific measurements for the radius and sides of the hexagons to the second decimal point. Delicious. Tweaked the numbers, ran the code and voila! honeycomb patterns galore. I had some rouge circles being drawn from when I was plotting out the x and y values within the word polygons, but some quick detective work found what they were in the layout, and the rouge line in the code.

Lastly, I got down to color. I’ve had it very clear from the beginning that I wanted a mix of yellows and oranges with different saturations. I tried it with a white background and while I like the softness of it, it kinda got lost. So I get dark and switched to black (also an homage to bumblebee colors) and the word now pops. I love it in every way and it’s exactly what I had pictured (more or less). True, unadulterated, unapologetic love.

Also, the picture doesn’t nearly do it justice. it’s so much better than how it looks like now!