Design seamless tartan, plaid, madras and gingham patterns. Export PNG and SVG.
Plaid Maker is a pattern studio for designers who work with checks and tartans.
Build a plaid the way it is woven: stack stripes as layers, set each one's offset, width, color and opacity, mirror it around the center, and choose horizontal, vertical or both. Switch between a flat view and a woven fabric view with smooth 2/2 twill.
Features
• Pattern families: Checks, Tartan, Madras, Houndstooth & Glen, and Grid, with ready presets, or start from a blank canvas
• Layers panel with blend modes and per-stripe weave
• Five color palettes and a shuffle button for quick ideas
• Rotate the whole pattern 45°
• Undo and redo
• Every export is seamless: the image is always a whole number of repeats
• Export as PNG (1080, 2048, 4096 px), a single tile, or a scalable SVG
• Save your designs and come back to them
Made for textile, print-on-demand, packaging and fashion designers who need a clean, repeatable plaid fast.
What is tartan?
Tartan is a pattern of crossing horizontal and vertical bands in several colors, originally woven in wool in Scotland. The bands repeat in a fixed sequence called the "sett", and the same sequence is used in both directions: the warp (vertical threads) and the weft (horizontal threads). Where two bands cross, their colors mix and form new shades, which gives tartan its depth. Traditional tartan is woven in a 2/2 twill, which creates the fine diagonal lines you see in real cloth.
Tartan, plaid and check: what's the difference?
• Tartan: the Scottish pattern with a defined sett, often tied to a clan or region.
• Plaid: in Scotland, a plaid was originally a large piece of tartan cloth worn over the shoulder. In North America the word now means any tartan-like crossing pattern.
• Madras: a lightweight cotton plaid named after the city of Madras (now Chennai) in India, known for bright summer colors.
• Gingham: an even check, usually white with one color, with equal stripes in both directions.
• Buffalo check: large blocks of two colors, classically red and black.
Plaid Maker follows these rules: a sett that repeats in both directions, mixed colors at the crossings, and a real twill weave view.