Mosaic Maker : Islamic Geometric Patterns
Kalidascope of Shapes : Mosaic Maker
One of the most beautiful aspects of the Middle East and Islamic-influenced regions is the elaborate tilework found on buildings and houses of worship. For a thousand years, artisans across the Islamic world built mosaics of staggering complexity using simple shapes. You can also see patterned work in art, stone work, ceramics, woodwork, and metalwork. Mosaic work was often combined with arabesque and Islamic calligraphy. By tradition, Islamic artists avoided figure work to avoid making objects of worship.
Our Mosaic Maker tool lets you try out pattern-making with the same pieces and rules.
Make a Mosaic
The Five Tiles
The shapes are called girih tiles, from the Persian word for “knot.” There are five of them: a decagon, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon, a bowtie, and a thin rhombus. They share one trait that makes mosaics symmetrical and beautifully fluid. Every piece’s edge is exactly the same length, and every angle is a multiple of 36 degrees. That shared edge is why they lock together so cleanly, and why our pieces snap into place here the way real tiles snap into real mortar. Work is often symmetrical and tessellated, extended by the eye as if to infinity.
The Straplines
The gold lines you can reveal are called straplines, and they are the part most people actually see when they look at an Islamic mosaic. Each strapline crosses the middle of every tile edge at the same angle. Because two neighboring tiles share an edge and share their midpoint, the line leaving one tile meets the line entering the next exactly, with no seam. Hide the tile shapes, and only the straplines remain: a continuous interlaced web that seems to have no beginning and no end.
The Math Underneath
In 2007, a physicist named Peter Lu noticed that some of these medieval patterns matched something mathematicians did not describe until the 1970s: Penrose tilings, arrangements that fill space forever without ever repeating. The craftsmen who built the shrine at Isfahan had stumbled onto quasicrystalline geometry five centuries early, not through equations but through patience, templates, and an eye for what fit.
How to Use the Mosaic Maker
Pick a tile from the row beneath the canvas, then click anywhere on the mosaic to drop it in. It rotates on its own and snaps against the nearest open edge, so the pieces always fit.
Choose a palette to set the mood, then pick a color and click any tile to paint it.
Want to choose a color? Tap the +swatch for the full color picker.
When you want to remove a piece, switch to Erase and click it. Switch back to keep building.
Press Show straplines to hide the tile shapes and reveal the woven gold pattern running through them, the finished mosaic. Press Show pieces to return to building.
Clear canvas wipes everything for a blank start; press it again to bring the opening pattern back.