April 2nd, 2025

Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

Dori the Giant created 13 animal designs from 13 circles, inspired by the Twitter logo. Prints start at $20, and she plans to share a tutorial on creating similar designs.

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Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

Dori the Giant, an artist, created a design challenge inspired by the Twitter logo, which consists of 13 circles. She designed 13 animals, each made from 13 circles, showcasing her aesthetic work. The project aims to add simplicity and beauty to her portfolio. The designs have garnered positive feedback from viewers, with many expressing interest in purchasing prints and requesting high-resolution images for wallpapers. Dori has indicated that prints are available for sale, with prices starting around $20 for an 11" x 14" size. She also mentioned that the designs were created using Illustrator and the shape builder tool, and she plans to share a tutorial on how to create similar designs. The project has sparked interest among viewers, with some expressing a desire to create their own circle animals. Dori's work has been well-received, with comments praising her creativity and inviting her to share more of her artistic process.

- Dori the Giant created 13 animal designs using 13 circles each, inspired by the Twitter logo.

- The designs are available for purchase, starting at $20 for an 11" x 14" print.

- Dori plans to release a tutorial on how to create similar circle designs using Illustrator.

- The project has received positive feedback, with viewers expressing interest in creating their own versions.

- Dori's work highlights the simplicity and beauty of geometric design in art.

AI: What people are saying
The comments on Dori the Giant's animal designs reflect a mix of appreciation and critique regarding the artistic process and the use of circles in design.
  • Many commenters express admiration for the creativity and challenge of creating designs from circles.
  • Some discuss the artistic restrictions and how they can lead to interesting outcomes.
  • There are references to similar artistic concepts and past works, highlighting a shared interest in circle-based designs.
  • Several users ponder the implications of AI in art creation, questioning its capabilities in replicating such designs.
  • Comments also touch on nostalgia for the Twitter logo and its circular design origins.
Link Icon 36 comments
By @DrNosferatu - 1 day
Not exactly circles, but famously:

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%27s_elephant

By @ezekg - 1 day
It's really satisfying to create logomarks solely out of circles, idk why. A challenge, I guess.

I did a few back in my day as a designer:

1. https://dribbble.com/shots/1909369-Liberty-Eagle-Arms

2. https://dribbble.com/shots/1553151-Flint-mark-icons

That first one is some of my best work.

By @rob74 - about 13 hours
> Inspired by the Twitter logo, which is made from 13 perfect circles

Compared to that, the new logo doesn't have a circle (segment) anywhere to be seen (unless you consider straight lines as circle segments with the center located at infinity of course), and is simply the "mathematical double-struck capital X" from an unknown but probably pre-existing font (apparently Monotype's "Special Alphabets 4" comes close, but isn't identical, according to https://tweethunter.io/blog/how-to-write-twitter-x-iphone-ma...).

By @sverhagen - 1 day
It feels like I'm looking at the next so many Ubuntu backgrounds!
By @nonethewiser - 1 day
Im curious what the process looks like to implement this. It seems like it would be easiest to start with the animal using only perfectly(?) curved lines and then complete them into circles after the fact. Although that seems kind of pointless and I imagine they start with circles. And I guess it would hard to have a curve from a perfect circle without the circle?

I just have a hard time imagining you start with circles, lay them down (resize as needed) and continue. I mean I guess that doesnt sound so crazy after I say it... it just seems like it would add a lot of extra noise to the image that would make it much harder to draw.

By @iamwil - 1 day
I remember some post that I can find now, that demonstrated the twitter bird logo is also made from circles. All I can find is this reddit post now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/txdimd/t...

By @apankrat - 1 day
I did something similar 15+ years ago to use as an avatar in forums, twitters and some such - https://swapped.ch/#!/personal-mark
By @thesz - about 14 hours
Because circles there also need operations over them (union, intersection or subtraction), it is a good example of low complexity art [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-complexity_art

My son is a big fan of bytebeat [2], which is also a low complexity art, but music.

[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/#4AAAA+kUryC/X0CixswNhQyM1Q01N...

By @abeppu - 1 day
See also work from Schmidhuber in the mid/late 1990s https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/locoart/node12.html
By @fracus - 1 day
Art with restrictions can be more interesting than without.
By @enqk - about 8 hours
Japanese family crests (Mon: 紋) are almost entirely made of circles (and lines, but that's rarer)

Often depicting slices of vegetables, animals..

From few circles to hundreds

By @vismit2000 - about 14 hours
Reminds of 'Drawing with circles' in 3b1b classic on Fourier series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6sGWTCMz2k

So if we remove the condition of 13, everything is in fact made of circles only!

By @saunved_42 - about 16 hours
I really love the way these look. I'm imagining a short film with these characters, and it'd be a nice experiment to see how it turns out.
By @ge96 - 1 day
I miss being creative, before I knew how to make front end UIs I had crazy ideas but then became grounded. This one isn't super crazy but I like those vertical buildings.

Tangent, with a dark/colorful theme in an editor the minimap looks like a city scape

By @gcanyon - about 18 hours
It bugs me than e.g. the owl's ears benefit from a dramatic change in color that isn't related to anything outlined by the circles.
By @agys - 1 day
My aunt grifted me “Animali Compassati” when I was a kid… A small book with instructions for animals that you could draw with a compass. The site is unclear somehow… but the instructions were pretty great in the book.

https://www.danielenannini.it/en/portfolio/animali-compassat...

https://www.compasses-zoo.net/compasses-zoo/index.php

By @noduerme - about 13 hours
This page feels like an AI traveled back in time and (faked) the date.

[edit] Nevermind. I'm being too harsh. The creator was obviously having fun and being creative. That's cool. I think if nothing else this just proves how jaded and skeptical about clever artwork I've become in the past few years.

By @__s - 1 day
Curious how well transforms on circles could be composed to animate these animals
By @KolibriFly - about 16 hours
Reminds me of how some of the best ideas come out of working within restrictions, not in spite of them
By @kleiba - about 11 hours
Not circles, but arcs.
By @glxxyz - 1 day
I never really liked Twitter but I feel oddly nostalgic for the logo now.
By @paulirish - 1 day
Vaguely related and also fun: https://www.koalastothemax.com/ (2011)
By @tzury - 1 day
2016…

This type of content is becoming rarer on the internet nowadays.

By @barbazoo - 1 day
Could this be the next captcha challenge? "Draw an animal out of 13 circles to prove you are human".
By @I_Nidhi - about 11 hours
Reminds me of the time we made geometric art using a compass. https://homeschoolmath.blogspot.com/2013/02/geometric-art-pr...
By @curiousObject - 1 day
Interesting.

What animals cannot be accurately depicted with 13 circles?

By @ksajh - 1 day
class Animal {

Circle circles_[13];

}

By @dukeofdoom - 1 day
This guy is doing something similar for his game:

The Procedural Animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlfh_rv6khY

Gibbon: Beyond the Trees - Wolfire Games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCKdGlpsdlo

By @deadbabe - 1 day
Could an AI generate art like this and actually utilize perfect circles, to create whatever you ask?
By @ajross - 1 day
I tend to wonder if stuff like this is an informative boundary on AI capabilities. I mean, you can't ask a LLM today to do that (AFAICT). "Here's a simply-specified but extremely broad search space, solve this problem in it" isn't something that fits the model. But it's a relatively common (if not "easy") task human beings like to show off.

What needs to change to enable this kind of exploration?