Kuba and Ndebele pattern generator
Hooks, triangles and nested frames. Choose Kuba cloth or Ndebele painting, the hook shape or layout, the outline weight and the pixel size, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.
Open in the generator How it works
Cloth and painted walls
The Kuba kingdom in the Congo is known for raffia cloth. Fibers of palm leaf are woven into squares, decorated with embroidery and sewn together, and the designs are worked out in interlocking hooks and angular lines that rarely repeat exactly from one square to the next. The Ndebele women of South Africa paint the walls of their houses with bold geometry: stepped triangles, nested frames and diamonds in strong colors, set off by thick black outlines.
Ornamatic draws general versions of these in the manner of the traditions. It does not copy a particular cloth or house.
How the generator builds them
Both styles are drawn as pixel bitmaps on a square grid. The Kuba tile is made of two blocks, each a hook, with the second turned half a turn so that the hooks lock together. In the Ndebele style a block of 12 by 12 pixels is filled with one of four shapes, such as stepped triangles pointing up or down, nested frames and diamonds, and each is outlined in the fourth color.
Pixel rows are merged into rectangles so there are no hairline gaps. The tile has a fixed number of pixels, so it repeats exactly.
What you can adjust
- Cloth — Kuba or Ndebele.
- Hook shape — for Kuba, three kinds of hook.
- Layout — for Ndebele, how the four shapes are arranged.
- Outline — for Ndebele, a thin or a thick outline.
- Pixel size — from a coarse grid to a fine one.
- Colors — a ground and up to three paints; any palette.
Export and use
Download the seamless tile as PNG or SVG, or copy a ready CSS background. The patterns you create are free to use, personally or commercially.
