How Tilings Work

Have a look around you, what do you see? Maybe a tiled bathroom wall, a brick facade outside the window, maybe a tartan scarf. You've been surrounded by tilings your whole life, but you may never have used that word for them.

A tiling covers a surface with repeating shapes, leaving no gaps and no overlaps. People have been playing around with this for a very long time: think back to the examples in Module 1 (

M1 · A brief history of patterns). Those craftspeople were working out, by hand, the same geometry you're about to harness using Repper.

A tiling is like a recipe for how to make a specific kind of pattern. Look at the image below; the little image sample is like the ingredient while the tiling is the set of instructions that tells it how to repeat across the surface.

Alexander, the technical brain behind Repper, explains it in more detail:

Use the same ingredient in a different recipe and you get a totally different dish. The same is true for patterns! Different tilings give you totally different patterns, even if the starting visual ingredient is the same:

So what's inside such a recipe? Surprisingly little. Every tiling is built from some combination of just three moves:

There's technically a fourth called the glide: a reflection and a move combined. Footprints in the sand are the classic example: left, right, left, each one a flipped and shifted copy of the last. We won't dwell on it, but now you can name it when you see it.

Tilings are made up of a series of instructions, from one up to dozens! Here you see an example of how the Bow Tie tiling in Repper is built up:

Don't worry if this dazzles your brain; it dazzles me too when I think about too deeply it 😊

All these recipes are built into Repper, so you don't need to understand them in detail. Repper generates them automatically, so you can focus on getting the look you're after. Pick with care, because these tilings have a big impact on the mood of a pattern. Reflection create balance: a mirrored pattern tends to feel calm and settled. Rotations create energy: things seem to spin, swirl, and dance. Once you start seeing patterns this way, you can't unsee it.

Here you see an example of the Echo Honeycomb in action, a tiling in Repper where you can even adjust the reflection in your pattern:

In the next chapter, we'll look what kinds of tilings are out there, How does their geometry affects that way that the image sample is being repeated, and some special types of tilings.