Maksim Surguy is a Ukrainian-born design technologist and artist who writes code to generate vector line drawings for pen plotters, laser engravers, and CNC machines.,Trained as a software engineer, he built a career in web and UX development before turning his programming skills toward generative art.
Surguy was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to the United States with his family in 2004, graduating from California State University, Fullerton with a degree in computer science in 2011. He worked as a web developer and UX engineer at NBC News from 2014 to 2017, building front-end software for video and live-blogging features. Surguy also attended a 15-month Master of Science in Technology Innovation program at the University of Washington. In 2017 he launched a line of modular LED displays called Neosegment Digit through a crowdfunding campaign on CrowdSupply, managing its hardware and software development through delivery of more than 500 units to backers.
On his website Surguy describes himself as “an inventor and an artist” whose interests include prototyping and making tools for generative art.He released Rad Lines, a free browser-based tool built with Vue.js and D3 that generates single-stroke vector line drawings suited for pen plotters, laser engravers, and CNC mills, framing the project as a way to make “semi-constrained creativity” accessible without cost or installation.Surguy followed it with Flow Lines, a companion tool for drawing the streamlines of mathematical formulas, which reached the number two spot on Product Hunt on its release day.He also sells vector artwork packs such as Rad Polygons through his site and runs the community platforms DrawingBots.net and PlotterFiles.com, sharing hundreds of plotting-ready SVG files.,On his personal blog he has reviewed pen plotters including the Sovol SO2.He has continued making generative art with Blender and physical plotters, and has been profiled as an “Artist in Focus” by Poptwig and interviewed by Joanna Ngai about his code-based practice.,
