Exploring the Tilings

In the previous chapter we looked at what tiling exactly is and how they’re built up. Here we’ll go deeper, looking at the broad range of tilings, the flavors they come in, and start to get a feel for what they’re capable off.

In Repper you may notice that the selection may change shape depending on which tiling you pick, like with the two tilings below. We colloquially call this the sample or selection, but the technical term for it is the domain of the tiling.

When we single out the domain and the single tile that is generated from it, we can see why the same is different for the different tilings. The right tiling called Cross has a diagonal reflection, which turns the domain into a triangle.

Open the tiling selector in Repper (open app) and you'll find 40 tilings. That can feel like a lot, but we can already simplify by looking at two big buckets: "seamless" and "seamed".

Seamless tilings repeat without visible seams (it's really in the name :-). They achieve this by relying entirely on reflections. Zoom out and you can't tell where one tile ends and the next begins, which is generally great for fabric, wallpaper, or anything printed edge to edge. On the other hand, seamed tilings also use “move” and “rotate” ingredients and thereby introduce seams.

So it's really down to reflections. When a tiling mirrors your sample, the two sides match perfectly and there’s no seam. Bring in moves and rotates and you’ll get seams. Look back at the move/rotate/reflect image earlier in the article. Now you know why the first two have hard edges!

Some tilings are basically siblings, with the difference being one reflection to turns the tiling seamless. The Bloom and Circle Saw tilings are an example of this:

Another clear pattern (😉) you see with tilings, is that they range from simple to complex. Use the same sample in a Half-Brick and a Persian Star tiling (one of my favorites), and the first will give you an simple orderly repeat, while the other turns into an intricate geometry. Neither is better. With Repper, complexity isn't something you need to level up to; it’s simply a creative choice you make, depending on the aesthetic you're after.

And a few tilings, like the Cairo you met in Module 2, come with their own extra controls, multiplying the possibilities from a single recipe.

Now that you know the difference, you might be tempted to things of seamless as "good" and seamed as "broken". Please don't! Seamed tilings are a little harder to work with, but offer unique pattern possibilities.

Because of the way the seamed tilings are constructed, they bring energy and directionality. Textile designer Becka Rahn turned a dog illustration into a delightful novelty repeat using a seamed zigzag, and we agreed in our interview: seamed tilings reward the designers who dare to play with them.

Find the edges too harsh anyway? Some of the seamed tilings have an Edge Blend option that softens the joins. This video helps you on your way (Michel has a particularly smooth presentation in this one ☺️):

Before we wrap up, a quick taste at the exotic end of the scale.

The Penrose tiling, first described by mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s, never exactly repeats. Zoom out as far as you like: while it looks self-similar, the structure is never quite the same. It's a fascinating and gorgeous pattern!

In this oldie-but-goldie video, I show you show the Penrose tiling works:

This is why it’s important that we understand how these tilings work in the first place: tilings aren't boring geometry homework. Tilings are creative choices, like choosing a brush or an instrument.

In one of our pattern contests, a winning collection was built entirely around the many angles of the HighFive tiling, and we loved it precisely because that choice became the collection's signature. Whether for a single pattern or across a collection (which we’ll cover in a later chapter!), picking tilings with intent is a foundational skill to develop as a pattern design.

You now have a better vocabulary and way to reason about tilings: how are they built up, seamless or seamed, simple or complex, etc. In the next chapter, we'll zoom out from the geometry to the feel of a pattern as a whole: what gives it weight, balance, and togetherness. Time to find some harmony.