Atomic Age and Bauhaus pattern generator

Two twentieth-century ways of looking at shapes. Choose Atomic Age or Bauhaus, how many cells fit across the tile, how rich the motifs are and how the shapes are scattered, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Teal starbursts and atoms with orange centers, black boomerangs and small plus signs on a cream ground

The atom and the square

After the Second World War, designers in Europe and America took the shapes of science and made them cheerful: starbursts like the Sputnik satellite, atoms with their orbits, boomerangs and kidney-shaped amoebas, in teal, orange and black on cream. This is the Atomic Age or midcentury modern look, found on curtains, laminates and wallpaper in the 1950s. A generation earlier the Bauhaus school, founded in Weimar in 1919, had reduced design to the circle, the triangle and the square in primary colors, and its weaving workshop under Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers made textiles out of such blocks.

Ornamatic draws general versions of both. They are not copies of any particular print or work.

How the generator builds them

The Atomic Age pattern lays starbursts of long and short rays, atoms with three tilted orbits and electrons, thick boomerang arcs and spotted amoebas in a grid, with small plus signs at the corners. A Bauhaus cell is chosen from quarter circles, half circles, right triangles, a circle in a square, stripes and concentric arcs, turned and colored at random, now and then on a square of another color.

The cells sit on a grid with a whole number of cells per repeat, so the tile repeats exactly. The variation setting changes which motif goes into which cell.