Preliminary drone photo of the 2014 Athena’s Owl Maze.

Designing the corn maze is a challenge every year. I’ve gotten better at handling the actual, physical design using Adobe Illustrator (not the easiest program to teach yourself, BTW…) but the theme is always tricky.

Here are some of the parameters I always set for the design:

• Aesthetically pleasing and interesting
• The central figure must be easily recognizable
• Must make a good maze (no long dead-ends; multiple ways to get through the maze; trails fill up the 1 acre field more or less equally throughout the entire field)
• Math concepts incorporated into design
• History/literature/other connections to design

New parameter for 2014: must be awesome enough for outdoor advertising–last year our Kraken maze made incredible billboards, so this year I wanted to also make something that could looking amazing and maybe a little scary for the outdoor people to work with. That’s why the owl turned out so creepy…

I’ll post more on the math and mythology connections in the maze, but the basic ideas involve geometry (most prominently the Platonic solids) and the Greek mythology stories of Athena.