Morris wallpaper pattern generator

Wallpaper of leaves and flowers. Choose a trellis, willow boughs, daisies or lilies, how large the flowers are, how many petals and leaves there are and how thick the stems, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

Red and gold flowers with cream centers linked by thin cream diagonals, with red leaf pairs, on a deep green ground

A garden on the wall

In the 1860s the English designer William Morris began printing wallpaper by hand from carved wooden blocks, against the machine-made papers of the time. His first designs, Trellis and Daisy, were followed in 1887 by Willow Bough. They have flat shapes, strong stems that cover the whole wall and plants taken from English gardens and hedgerows, and they made up what we now call the Arts and Crafts style. A Victorian room around them is full of the same dense, rhythmic foliage. Art Nouveau, which followed in the 1890s, kept the plant but let the stems whip and sway: tall lilies on long curving stalks became one of its favorite wallpaper subjects.

Ornamatic draws patterns in this spirit. They are not copies of any particular Morris wallpaper.

How the generator builds them

The trellis is a diamond lattice of thin stems with a large flower where the stems cross, a small bud halfway along and pairs of leaves along each stem. The willow bough is a long sine-shaped stem with a leaf at every step, alternating left and right. The daisy has a big and a small flower on slim stems, each with a pair of leaves. The lily is a tall flower with a fan of petals on a swaying stem, with long sword leaves, two to a repeat.

A wallpaper repeats by sliding half a drop, so the flowers sit on a staggered lattice and the stems are periodic curves that end exactly where they began. The tile joins up without a seam in every style.

What you can adjust

Style — trellis, willow bough, daisy or lily.
Size — how large the flowers and leaves are.
Petals or Leaves — how many petals each flower has, or how many leaves are on a bough.
Period proportions — how tall the repeat is compared with its width.
Stem weight — from a fine line to a bold stalk.
Colors — a ground and up to three more; any palette.