Hi, I’m glad you’re here. Fractallure is the result of years of curiosity, code, and a love for both mathematics and beauty. This site showcases my personal, curated collection of original fractal renders – each one built from scratch using custom software I’ve developed over the past 2 decades.

How it started

My interest in wallpapers started in the early 2000’s when I discovered digitalblasphemy.com. Inspired, I played around with the era’s ray tracers, like Bryce and Poser, to create a handful of 3d renders which were generally well received by friends I shared them with.

My fascination with fractals began in university around 2004, when I was introduced to complex numbers. I wrote my first fractal generator in Delphi (Pascal-based), which helped me understand the basics of rendering the Mandelbrot set. It was extremely elementary and I remember the excitement I felt the first time I saw my program output part of a spiral arm of a Julia set! It was just a white background with some black pixels of non-escaped coordinates, but but the pattern was unmistakable and so satisfying to see. I continued with it for a while, and in fact I still have the archived code somewhere, but being a computer science student, I soon realized Pascal and Delphi had no real future.

In the early 2010s I decided to start from scratch and rewrote my fractal code in Java. That codebase has grown steadily and now surpasses the size of some of my professional projects. Over the years, I’ve deep-dived mainly into performance optimisations and advanced colouring techniques – driven by curiosity, an eye for beauty, and a desire to understand the mathematics behind everything I was doing. Finding good literature on the topic has been tough overall, mainly (I guess) because there’s no real world use for coloring Mandelbrot sets other than for the sake of it. But I stuck with it and I’ve gotten it to the point where rendering a triple monitor image at 8K resolution (with 64 subsamples per pixel no less, effectively 19.2 billion coordinate points to iterate) takes only a few hours on a modest pc.

Every image on this site is 100% generated by my own code. This has been, and continues to be, a labour of love.

Where things are now

A few years ago, I noticed a gap online: high-quality, visually balanced fractal art was surprisingly rare. Many pieces I found had overstimulating colour palettes or were poorly laid out – fine for showcasing the maths and theory but not suited for daily use like desktop wallpapers.

I wanted to create images that were aesthetically pleasing, technically crisp, and thoughtfully laid out – images that could be appreciated by people who weren’t fractal or mathematics enthusiasts. I started to realize that my work held up to some of the best out there and that others may be interested in these images for the art itself rather than the underlying mathematics.

So I polished my coloring algorithms, custom coded a colour palette and optimized the code to the point where I could quite easily render a new image every other day.

I launched this website is a way of carving out a personal space to showcase my work without the noise of mainstream platforms. A place to call home.

Is this my job?

No, I have a full time job as a software developer, so this is completely a side project. And life gets busy, so between my work, travel, and family life with my wonderful wife and amazing daughter, time for fractals is scarce – but inspiration strikes occasionally. I also travel regularly for work, and those quiet evenings away from home are perfect for fractal experimentation and pondering some of the more obscure mathematical questions.

I’m not planning to have this replace my day job, but it’s a nice side-project and addition to my portfolio.

Enjoy your stay — I’m glad to see you here.