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Mazes of All Shapes

Over the last few years, I have written a program which can make mazes of arbitrary shapes. Some of the most popular shapes are that of names. For example, using my daughter's name and a weave pattern she thought of:

Notes

1. The image above is a JPEG file at moderate resolution. All the images below are 24 bit colour BMP maze files and are much sharper.

2. All the mazes have exactly one path between any two points in the maze, including between the single entrance and exit for any maze or separate maze component. That is, there are no circuits within the mazes.

3. You will need a program which can handle zip files. An evaluation copy of the (very good) WinZip utility is available here.

4. I live in Australia, where our standard paper size is A4. These bitmaps should fit neatly onto one A4 landscape page - maybe with slightly less than default margins. I hope it works for other sizes you may wish to use. Please tell me if it does not.

5. Some people have asked for instructions, so here are some:
   • Click on an underlined maze.
   • A dialog to download a file may appear. If one does, click on the Save As button.
   • In any case, wait for the file to download.
   • As mentioned above, you need a program to unzip the zip file. Double clicking on the saved file in Explorer should activate it, if you have such a program.
   • Extract the .bmp file from the zip file.
   • Within your bitmap viewing program, use File/Page Setup to change the Orientation to Landscape, and (probably) adjust the Left and Right Margins to about 15mm (= 0.6 in).
   • Print the .bmp file image.
   • Solve it, frame it, give it away as a present.
6. If you want me to add some new names, please do not ask for more than 3 at once, at least not if you want me to do them done quickly.

Name Mazes

There can be some mazes with distorted patterns (ask for them!), with subscript suffixes as follows:

        w    -    straight waves

        z     -    zigzag maze walls

        inv  -    inverted (the letters are the background)

I can also use a colour scheme from another image. See Sunnry (a lovely PNG man I met on a trip there in 2002) for example.

        i      -    image colour scheme

I have put the most recent ones in red. I will try to make this to be for files whose age is two months or less.

I often cull names to get some space back. If you see one of these gone and want me to keep it there, please e-mail me here (you need to tell which maze you want to keep!). Even if I have deleted it from the site, I will keep a copy.

I intend to add to these as I have time or on request. I may also put new versions of the colour schemes or the mazes themselves for each name, so check in at least monthly to see what's new. If I update a maze, I will mark it with the new date (initially in red, as above).

Other Word Mazes

A while ago, I used some of these and other mazes I had made to form the complete text of a birthday card.

Use them to make your own birthday and Christmas cards!

Mazes of Other Shapes

Teachers - you could even have some of these as homework mazes !

Colour Patterns

These colour patterns are available. Parameters such as number of cycles or lines, lines thickness or angle, colour boundary etc can be configured. I can also use any image (preferably a simple one with bright strong colouring) as a colour template - see the animal shapes above.

	Circle		Lines – wavy		Spiral - linear
	Explosion		Lines – zigzag		Star
	Flower		Patchwork		Sunrise
	Hypercircle 1		Random areas		Weave
	Hypercircle 2		Spiral – exp		Random per cell
	Lines – straight		Spiral – log		Single colour

Other maze sites

Other interesting maze sites may be found at

Contact me

If you would like me to

• add any names or other mazes (or a new version of an existing maze, click here. If you would like a new version of an existing name, an email request will put it at the top of my list of names to update.
• I would especially like suggestions for names - such as Juan above - from non-English speaking countries - click here,
• e-mail you each time I update the page, click here
• or if you have any other suggestions, click here

Have fun with them! Tell me what you do with them.

Mark Michell

All text and images are copyright © Mark Michell 2001-2003, but may be used freely for non-profit purposes. Write to me about any other uses of these mazes. It would be nice of you to say where you got the images if you do use them. I have deliberately not spoiled the images themselves with such notices.

This page last edited on 16 August 2003