A New Business Card

I recently designed a new business card, using an interesting geometrical structure as a design element. The design is based on a circular Dirichlet tessellation, also known as a Voronoi diagram with multiplicative weights. The design seemed appropriate because I have done research on these structures in the past, in a paper I wrote with Ethan Bolker in the eighties.

In the multplicative Voronoi diagram, we start with a finite number of sources (points) in the plane, each assigned a positive weight w. The diagram consists of the circles or circular arcs that divide the plane into regions, where the region corresponding to point P consists of all points X such that
|P-X|/w(P) is less than or equal to |Q-X|/w(Q) for every other source Q.

You can think of the sources as being restaurant locations and the weights as being a desirability rating, so if w(P) is r times w(Q), a customer is willing to travel r times as far to go to P as to go to Q. For the case of two sources, the boundary is the circle of Apollonius of ratio r. The case where all weights are equal reduces to the classical Voronoi diagram, where the circular arcs degenerate into straight lines.

If you would like to play around with these diagrams, you can use the applet written by Gabi Knuppertz at http://www.pi6.fernuni-hagen.de/GeomLab/VoroMult/. I was not able to find the needed plugin for Firefox, but got it to work fine in Internet Explorer.