Tile Tricks: Tessellation Art

Draw a shape that fits with copies of itself forever, with no gaps and no overlaps. Tile Tricks turns a plain square, hexagon or pentagon into a creature, a bird, a fish or any wild shape you like. Push a bump into one edge and the matching dent appears in the neighbouring tile at the same moment, so your tiles always fit together. ★ HOW IT WORKS • Pick a tiling: square, turning square, hexagon, turning hexagon, Cairo pentagon, octagon + square or rhombus. • Tap an edge to add a point and drag it. Bezier handles give smooth curves, sharp corners or straight lines. • Draw eyes, scales or patterns inside the tile. Your drawing repeats on every tile and turns with it. • Colour the pattern. Neighbouring tiles always get different colours, so the shapes stand out. • Press the dice for a surprise shape when you need an idea. ★ TRACE AND PLAN • Put a photo under the tile and trace its outline. • Sketch rough planning lines over the tile. Guides never appear in your exports. ★ SAVE, SHARE, PRINT • Keep your designs in your own gallery: rename, open again, save copies. • Save a high-resolution picture or share it. • Print an A4 coloring page with outlines only. Great for classrooms and kids. • Export a seamless HD pattern that repeats with no visible seam, ready for print-on-demand shops: fabric, wallpaper, shirts and phone cases. ★ WHAT IS A TESSELLATION? A tessellation (or tiling) covers a flat surface with shapes that fit together with no gaps and no overlaps, like the tiles on a floor. Only three regular shapes tile by themselves: triangles, squares and hexagons. Bees discovered the hexagon long before we did. People have tiled for thousands of years. Sumerian builders pressed coloured clay cones into walls in repeating patterns, Romans laid floor mosaics, and craftsmen in the Islamic world created stunning star-and-polygon patterns, such as those in the Alhambra in Granada. Mathematicians joined later. In 1619 Johannes Kepler studied which regular polygons can tile together. In 1891 Evgraf Fedorov proved that every repeating flat pattern belongs to one of just 17 symmetry groups. In the 1930s Heinrich Heesch described which shapes of tiles can fill the plane by sliding and turning, the same moves Tile Tricks uses. Roger Penrose found tiles in the 1970s that cover the plane without ever repeating, and amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice discovered new tiling pentagons at her kitchen table. In 2023 a single "hat" shape was found that tiles the plane but never repeats. The pentagon tiling in the app is called the Cairo tiling, because similar pentagon patterns pave streets in Cairo. ★ WHY YOU WILL LIKE IT • Works offline, no account needed. • Arabic and English. • Made for curious kids, students, teachers, artists and puzzle lovers. Create your first tile in a minute, and see how far one shape can go.

First release of Tile Tricks! • 7 templates: squares, hexagons, Cairo pentagon, octagon + square, rhombus • Bezier points with handles, plus random shapes • Draw inside the tile, and trace from your own photo • Colours, saved designs gallery • Export images, coloring-page PDF and seamless HD patterns