Gothic tracery and muqarnas pattern generator

Stone made light. Choose foils, an ogee lattice or rows of niches, how many lobes and nested arches there are, and how heavy the lines, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Gold and red four-lobed quatrefoils with cream outlines inside blue square cells, with red diamonds at the corners

Tracery in the windows, niches in the vaults

Tracery is the stonework that divides the upper part of a Gothic window: thin bars that bend into circles, lobes and pointed arches. The lobed shapes are called foils, and the number of lobes gives the name: trefoil, quatrefoil, cinquefoil. The ogee, an arch with an S-shaped curve on each side, came into fashion in the fourteenth century and returned in the architecture of India and Persia. Muqarnas is the Islamic counterpart: tiers of small niches that stack into a honeycomb vault, a way to turn a square room into a dome.

All three are ways of making a heavy material look lacy and weightless.

How the generator builds them

The foils are drawn as arcs that meet at sharp cusps, with cells separated by thin bars and a diamond where four cells meet. The ogee lattice is made of S-curves that close into cells, optionally colored in a checker. The niches are rows of pointed arches, each with smaller arches inside, laid like scales so that the lower row overlaps the one above.

Every cell has a whole number of repeats in the tile, and the arcs are cut at the same places on opposite edges, so the pattern joins up without a seam.