It would be really nice if the tutorial walked you through creating a sample simple fractal, like the Sierpinski triangle or Koch snowflake.

Yes, tried to create but due to lack of instructions and poor UX abandoned the site quickly.

Agree. It'd be good to be able to unpick the really good ones on there and understand how they were created. I just made nasty looking splodges and then gave up :-/

Related -- a tool for creating fractals:

Context Free Art - https://www.contextfreeart.org/

It would be cool if the preview was shown and auto-updated every time a change is made.

JWildfire, a Java desktop application to author "flame" fractals (a slight generalization of these IFS constructions) has a nice realtime preview and a subtly less maddening user experience.

Author here. Happy to answer any questions.

Firstly, I think this is a cool idea. Fractals are fun to look at and play with. Please take this feedback as being positively-intentioned :)

During the tutorial I clicked Add and some boxes were created. I dragged them around on the canvas. I have no concept of how the resulting image [0] relates to what I created. It doesn't look like the kind of fractals (Mandelbrot etc) that I'm familiar with.

I also didn't figure out how to do anything other than move some boxes around. Probably I just missed something.

[0] https://fractal.parts/i-dont-get-it <-- if you click the "Attractor" (what does that mean?) toggle in the top right you can see the "Template" I created in the editor.

The fractals on this site are not "escape-time fractals" like the Mandelbrot set, but iterated function systems[1], a more discrete fractal variant that starts with an initial generating set and then replaces each element with a smaller copy of the whole set (a good example would be ferns).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system

Agreed, I can't see how the output is produced from the input, e.g https://fractal.parts/dfdfdfdfd it took several tries to even produce anything other a totally blank output.

Here's my try. Any idea why it didn’t result in the Sierpinsky triangle?

https://fractal.parts/test-a1d7

I can't seem to create more than 1 box of the same color.

Thanks for giving the site a try! Simple answer: the shapes in your template are too small. Try scaling the squares to 1/2 the size of that larger, white square in the center. This can be seen in the template for https://fractal.parts/sierpinski.

Each shape that you add is a transformation from the base shape. The base shape is that large, white square that appears when you first head to fractal.parts/create. The transformations in your template are around 1/4 the size of the base shape. Your template also has a fair bit of whitespace. Together this produces a fractal that progressively disappears.

@TimTheTinker I've deployed a new version of the site that defaults shapes to half the size of the base. Hopefully that helps!

Nice work! @epenson: unfortunately, it only took a few hours for someone to create https://fractal.parts/swastika and get it on the gallery :(

It's an ancient symbol. Let's just enjoy the fractal-ness of this entry in the gallery, and not allow the idea to be misappropriated.

Tried to publish with Firefox, got the following error (in console):

TypeError: t.t0.response is undefined Create.js:139:16

Please fix your site for Firefox; it's sad when people only test with Chrome :(

Sorry about the trouble. Should be fixed now (https://github.com/ElliotPenson/fractal.parts/issues/51)