“The Nature of Code”
Folks writing animation patterns might be interested in this book, “The Nature of Code”: http://natureofcode.com/ This book describes some great techniques for programming interesting (‘natural-looking’) patterns. You can buy an e-book, or a physical copy, and you can also read the whole book online for free, too: http://natureofcode.com/book/
The code examples in the book are written in “Processing”, which is usually very easy to adapt to Arduino C/C++, with the one notable exception that Processing sketches don’t usually have a 2K memory limit on data. Nevertheless, the techniques are interesting and most can scale up and down easily.
http://natureofcode.com