Zellige mosaic pattern generator

Stars made of many small pieces. Choose an eight-point or six-point star, how sharp its points are, how wide the grout is and which colors go to which pieces, and export a seamless pattern as SVG, PNG or CSS.

Open in the generator How it works

A mosaic of a cream-and-teal eight-point star pattern in terracotta, gold and turquoise pieces separated by thin pale grout lines

A mosaic cut tile by tile

Zellige is the mosaic tilework of Morocco, long associated with Fès and the palaces of the Maghreb and of Andalusia. A tile-setter glazes square tiles in a few colors, cuts them into small pieces of fixed shapes with a hammer, lays the pieces face down and pours plaster over the back. When the plaster sets, the whole panel is turned over. The geometry comes from the same family as the stars of other Islamic ornament: eight-point stars separated by crosses, six-point stars with hexagons between them.

Because every piece is cut by hand, real zellige is slightly uneven, with a faint wobble in the joints that a machine-made tile lacks.

How the generator builds them

The star is cut into its pieces the way a mosaic maker would cut it: kites for the arms, triangles in the notches and a polygon at the center, and the ground between the stars into small kites and triangles too. The pieces fit with no gaps, and the grout is made by shrinking each piece a little toward its middle.

The eight-point pattern repeats on a square and the six-point pattern on a rectangle that holds two stars, so both tile without a seam. A color-order setting hands out the colors to the pieces in a different way each time.