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Creating rhythm
🧠 What you'll learn
- Put words to the rhythm of a pattern with five ideas borrowed from music: meter, tempo, accents and rest, and direction
- Spot where repetition comes from, at three levels: the domain, the tiling, and the surface
- Read your own patterns for rhythm, so you can steer their energy instead of stumbling upon it
In the previous chapters you learned how tilings are templates that tell a pattern how to repeat. These small instructions to move, rotate and reflect turn into the tilings we use. Now we zoom out to see how all the repetition expresses itself across whole patterns. What makes a pattern attractive is variety in repetition, as Michel talks about in this video:
That balance between simplicity and complexity, similarity and variation, that's what I like to call the pattern's rhythm. Music is a wonderful way to think about this, because rhythm in music is also more than just a beat that repeats. There's a count, a speed, accents and pauses, a sense of going somewhere. In this chapter we borrow a handful of those musical terms, to help articulate what you see in a pattern, think about it, and make better decisions. We'll go into each in this chapter and afterwards look at how you can create them in small and big scale in patterns.
Rhythm has a sibling: harmony, which gets the next chapter. The two overlap, so here's how I keep them apart. Rhythm is about how similar elements repeat. Harmony is about how their looks interact: shape, colour, texture. It's two different lenses to look at the same pattern.
Meter: Steady beat or swing
Music has a meter: pop has a steady four beats per bar, a waltz has three. Other music has six beats, or even five or seven.
Patterns are like that too. Many patterns have a square or rectangular look, which you can think of as the steady 4-beat of pop. It's straight, catchy, familiar and easy. Like pop, the simplicity risks being boring, so you want to do it right: make it well-considered and interesting. Triangular and hexagonal patterns are like the waltz. They feel more dynamic, more in motion, while still having a clear structure. Instead of straight up-down and left-right repetition, you see diagonal lines of repeats. They have a timeless quality.
Some songs have two beats (2/4). They can feel really simple, staccato, with quick looping. The Centipede tiling (the one labelled PM) reminds me of that, with its single reflection axis.
Lastly, there are the odd ones. Sometimes literally, as when a tiling has an odd number of sides. Think of the High Five and Penrose with their 5-sided qualities. They are very dynamic and hard to grasp. It makes the eye move about without finding a place to rest. They are busier but also never get boring.
Tempo: Quick or slow pacing
Do patterns have a tempo? Indeed. Like music can have few or many beats in a minute, patterns can have many or few repeats in a given area.
The number of repeats depends on the levels we talked about: some tilings already pack a lot of repeats in them, others don't. By scaling the pattern on a surface, you create a low or high tempo on top of that.
One important thing to keep in mind: a higher tempo reveals the repetitive nature of a pattern. For very simple patterns this can be exactly what you want. It's how you create what's often called a blender pattern: little detail, many repeats, and no attempt to hide that it's a repeat. For complex tilings that already have a lot of repeats in their recipe, you might want to reduce the repeats across the surface instead.
✏️ Exercise: Find the blender point
Take any pattern you've made (or create one) and in surface view, slowly increase the repeat count. At some point the design stops reading as a "design" and starts looking like a "texture". Where is that point for your pattern? Then go the other way until only one or two repeats fit. Which end suits it better, and why?
👁️ Looking ahead: Blender patterns and collections
Blender patterns are the unsung heroes of a pattern collection: simple designs that let a detailed hero pattern shine. We'll get into how to build a whole collection around that idea in a later module [chapter X].
Accents and rest
While geometric patterns lean towards even repeating and spacing, they can still contain a rhythm of accents and rests in their repeat.
Take these two patterns, both made with the Arabesque tiling. The first one evenly fills the space, while the second leaves space ("rest") between the main feature and puts small variants ("accents") in between. Very similar and yet so different. Neither is better or worse. They simply have a different effect, and it all depends on what you're trying to achieve.
Direction: which way does it flow?
A march moves you forward, a lullaby sways from side to side. Patterns have that quality too: some send your eye in one direction, others let it wander.
Most seamless tilings are built from reflections, and mirrors cancel each other out. This makes seamless patterns often look very balanced and "without direction", so to speak. That said, they definitely can have dominant lines, like the vertical blue elements in this Cairo tiling:
But it's with the seamed tilings that even more directionality comes in. That's because whenever the domain is moved or rotated but not reflected, you get a flow in a direction.
The first is rotational direction. Notice how the Fan (P6) tiling has a real twisty feeling, while its sibling the Honeycomb (P6M) looks much calmer because it reflects rather than rotates:
The second direction that seamed tilings can introduce, is direction across the surface. Some of the simpler seamed tilings, like the Centipede (PM) we saw before, have this sense of moving from one side of the surface to the other. Here is another example with a Roof Tile (CM) tiling. See how all the flowers are pointing up? And of course, you can rotate the whole surface to make it point in any direction you want, including diagonally.
Talking about rotation: Under the pattern panel in Repper you'll find a rotate slider. Even a strictly square pattern gets a different vibe when you tilt it by a few degrees on the surface: the symmetry lines stop lining up with the edges of the screen, and the whole thing feels more natural and alive. This quick tip video explains more:
✏️ Exercise: Tilt and turn
Pick a pattern with a square tiling and, in surface view, drag the rotate slider a few degrees. What changes in how it feels? Then switch the same sample to a seamed tiling and look which way the seams run: straight, zigzag, or wavy. Did your pattern gain a direction?
Rhythm across three levels
Repetition can happen at different levels in a pattern: across the surface, within a tiling, and within the domain (the selected bit of the source image). That may sound abstract, but it's easy enough with some visuals!
In the overview below you can clearly see repeats at each level:
- Domain: There are multiple yellow lines in the source image. They are all slightly different, which adds variety to the yellow lines repeated across the tiling.
- Tiling: Here you see how the blue-teal element from the domain gets repeated in two ways: the center point and "petals" are similar but different in shape, while the petals create a rotational repeat in four directions.
- Surface: The yellow elements at the edges of the tiling now connect between tiles and create new repeating shapes. As a whole, a foreground and background emerge: yellow as a connecting backdrop for the black and blue flower-like shapes.
✏️ Exercise: Three levels
Open Repper and create a pattern. Any tiling works, but I recommend one of the seamless ones from the top of the list, to keep it simple for now. Analyse what rhythms you can spot on the three levels: domain, tiling, and surface.
Don't take these three levels as a strict structure to think about rhythm with. They are just a way to put words to the different places where repeats happen, and that can help you think about, and make better decisions on, your geometric pattern design.
💡 Tip: Name it first, then find it
I often find it easier to first articulate what rhythms I see (or am looking for), and only then go looking for where those rhythms actually come from. Describing before diagnosing keeps you from getting lost in the mechanics.
Reading rhythms: five examples
Here are some designs I made with one of the demo images in Repper. Yes, they all come from the same image! Don't they look good together? We'll talk about combining patterns into collections in a later chapter.
For now, let's look at the rhythmic qualities. You can basically treat this whole section as an exercise: look at the pattern, try to describe the rhythms, then compare with what I wrote below it. Describe not just what you see, but also how it feels. There isn't a strict right or wrong, but it's interesting to see where your review aligns with and differs from mine.
My review
The four-sided tiling makes it feel stable, even a bit static, though the diagonal angles of the diamonds make it a bit more dynamic. There is a lot of rest, and without a clear main element, all elements kind of feel like accents on a plain background. The orthogonal (meaning horizontal plus vertical) design makes it feel steady, and the simplicity over the whole surface makes it really suitable for many repeats (a "high tempo"), as it is not trying to hide that it's a basic repeat. A blender pattern, in other words.
My review
The six sides give it more motion, like a waltz, which is accentuated not just by the central flower-like shape but also by the decoration around it. The decoration has a nice flowing feel to it, because it is shared between the central elements. It rolls around and in between, and your eye can follow it throughout the surface, thanks to the tiling's blueprint. Interestingly, those blue decorations come in a one-and-two combination: a small blue triangle and two lighter love hearts. This creates an additional detail rhythm. Because the design is simple and yet has a lot of nice rhythmic elements, it can work with a small and large repeat alike.
My review
This pattern shows a great many repeating qualities. One rhythm that stands out right away is the main floral element with 12 sides, almost like a clock, which is characteristic of the Persian Star tiling. If you look at just the pink dot in the middle, you can see the high-level repeat is a quite simple triangular shape, which has the calm but in-motion feeling of a three-beat waltz. In terms of accents, there is a nice visual rhythm between the large central flower, the smaller six-sided shapes, and the small white accent, going from three colours to two colours to one. In the next chapter, we'll talk more about this kind of harmony in aesthetics (rather than strictly rhythm).
My review
This is a Penrose tiling. If you haven't seen or heard of it before: here is a short video from me explaining where it comes from and why it's special. As you can see, because I've taken a very simple domain, almost all of the rhythm comes from the tiling spread across the surface. You really see the shape of the tiling itself. Because the Penrose tiling has so many unusual angles, the design feels very dynamic and barely repeating, like a jazz composition. The meter of the design can be many things, depending on where and how you look: the groups of one, two, and three blobs spread across, or the five-sided "star" in the middle (can you spot it?). Because of this amount of dynamics and flow, it feels almost organic, like I'm looking at single-celled organisms under a microscope.
When the rhythm changes
The Penrose tiling in the last example already has some "changing rhythm" quality to it. But what if the pattern actually changes across the surface?
Meet the Metamorphosis. This is a unique effect in Repper, which morphs the pattern either horizontally, vertically, or circularly. Without going into the details of how exactly it works, let's look at what it does to the rhythm.
My review
The basic shape that runs across comes from the Bloom tiling, with a 15-sided repeat around, which looks almost circular. This gives the pattern its foundation. Going from inside out, we see a wavy circle, then spiky shapes, which then transform into petals. In the centre and at the outer edges there is a lot of rest in the plain background, while the part in between is "disturbed" by a transition full of spikes and angles. It makes the design both calm and busy at the same time!
Compared to most patterns, those using the Penrose tiling or the Metamorphosis effect feel less like a repeating "bar of music" and more like a whole composition playing out over time.
👁️ Looking ahead: How Metamorphosis works
Metamorphosis pulls in more of your source image than the domain alone, which is why the pattern keeps changing. We'll take it apart properly, including what it means for exporting, in [chapter X].
Up next
Harmony, coming up next, is the more tangible of the two siblings. You can point at it: this colour, that shape, that texture. Rhythm is harder to point at, because it's about structure. It's the how of the repeating, and that's exactly why we borrowed the vocabulary from music: nobody can point at a beat either, yet everyone can feel one. So in the next chapter we move from feeling to seeing, and look at how size, shape, colour, and texture play together at any given moment. That's harmony.
🔑 Key Takeaway
Rhythm is how a pattern repeats, not what it looks like. Meter, tempo, accents and rest, and direction give you words for it, and the tiling, the repeat count, and the domain are the dials that set it.
🤔 Reflection exercise
Think of a pattern you love, on a piece of clothing, a wallpaper, wherever. If it were a piece of music, what would it be? A steady pop song, a waltz, something jazzy? Then ask yourself where that feeling comes from: the tiling, the tempo, or the space between things.