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Finding harmony
🧠 What you'll learn
- Think of your pattern design as a play between focal areas and all-over variation.
- Understand the control you have over the harmony in your patterns.
- Pick up quick techniques for judging your own work, starting with the humble squint.
Some patterns simply feel right. Every element seems in its right place, but can you articulate why and recreate such an effect in your own work? Other patterns are technically fine and seamless, and yet something feels off. Can you fix them to get from okay to great? This chapter is about learning to seeing the play between harmony and tension, and how to navigate it.
In the last chapter we look at the rhythm of a pattern: its meter, its tempo, rests, accents, and its direction. Now we look at what that rhythm is made of, the visuals themselves. Why does this need its own chapter when unity and balance are taught in every general design course, you might ask. It's because repetition makes it doubly important! A small imperfection you'd accept in an illustration gets repeated dozens of times across a wallpaper. And with the tiling you choose, you create new elements, but not always intentionally. Pattern design is an iterative process, we want to learn how to evaluate your designs for harmony and fix weaknesses when we find them.
The 4 ingredients
There are four ingredients we typically look at and you know these all already, but it's good to spell them out anyway. We want them top of mind, especially as we look at the examples later in the chapter.
- Shape: Straight or rounded, geometric or organic. A family of forms or a mix.
- Size: Thee relative sizes of the elements, from all-equal to strongly varied.
- Texture: The surface feel, from flat and smooth to grainy and handmade.
- Color: A vital ingredient, so it gets its own chapter right after this one.
A fifth common ingredient is subject (what is depicted), but this matters more for collage-like patterns than geometric ones based on tilings, so we’ll leave that one aside for now.
✏️ Exercise: Describe patterns through ingredients
Below are 4 patterns, all made in Repper with the same tiling (Cross Weave). Try to describe the pattern using the 4 ingredients. Just describe, no need to critique yet, we’ll get to that. For example, is the texture flat, paper-like, or heavy? If you want to take it one step further, describe how the ingredients interact with one another!
👁️ Looking ahead: Choosing Color
Color matters enormously and deserves more than a paragraph. Chapter 3.5, Choosing Color, is entirely devoted to it. For this reason, I'll focus more on the others in this chapter.
Focal points & variety
Picture a meadow seen from a hillside. A two blossoming trees catch your eye right away, as does a herd of cows. The rest is a sea of greens: bushes, grass, and little plants, each varying a little in size, color, and kind.
That view describes the two harmonic concepts we’ll talk about here:
- The blossoming trees are focal points: the places where your eye lands first and will often return too.
- The rest and the scene as a whole is variety: elements that work together and have more or less variety.
This split helps us think about harmony, but keep in mind that it's in reality a spectrum. Make variety bold enough and it starts producing focal points, and where exactly a standout becomes a focal point is up for debate. Don't let that bother you and just use the language to facilitate your thinking.
Focal point: where your eye lands
A viewer's eye has to land somewhere first. A focal point is simply the element that wins. Your pattern might have one clear winner, a few to move between, or an even spread where nothing particularly stands out (all focal points or none, depending how you look at it!). All are valid designs, it’s just about making clear choices that align with your intention and how you intend to apply the design.
Size is the obvious way to make an element stand out, but the key concept here is contrast with the surroundings. A tiny red berry stands out from a field of green leaves. Shape does the same: one rounded form among angular ones draws the eye. And color, probably most powerfully of all.
In a pattern, focal points come about in two ways (see images below):
- Carried: An element that already stands out in your sample selection, which the tiling then repeats across the surface, like a stand-out color.
- Emergent: The tiling creates a focal point by how the sample and tiling interact, often by creating a new shape that stands out.
As is very clear from these examples: a focal point never stays alone in patterns. Depending on how it interacts with your tiling and repeat count, that repetition either feels pleasantly balanced or rather jarring.
Important is to watch out for unintended focal points, which is a classic beginner’s tell. A bit of color at the edge of your selection, a few dots merging where tiles meet: small stray elements quietly hijack attention once they're repeated everywhere.
Can a pattern with no focal point be great? Absolutely. In this review, which was part of a collection design contest we did, you can see how the blender patterns on the right are intentionally simple and without focal points, to let the hero pattern shine:
So how do you check where the eye lands, when you made the pattern yourself and know every corner of it by heart? Two quick techniques:
- Squint: Detail falls away and what’s left are focal points.
- Fresh eyes: Look away for ten seconds, or come back after a coffee, and notice where your eye lands first.
✏️ Exercise: Make it lead, make it blend
Pick a source image with one element that clearly stands out. First, place and size your sample selection so the pattern leads with that element. Then move the selection until nothing stands out at all. Squint at both results: which one would you keep, and for what use?
Variety: blending sameness and difference
Back to the hillside. Once you've spotted the blossoming trees, your eye starts to wander around. How much do the other trees and bushes resemble each other in regard to each ingredient? The same can be applied to patterns (and has more use than our meadow photo :-).
- How wide is the color range?
- Do the shapes speak one language (all straight, all rounded) or several?
- Are the size differences subtle enough to still read as one surface?
- Texture tends to be fairly stable in image, but it doesn’t need to be, especially when using photograph as source.
Here's a distinction that will sharpen your eye: variation in degree versus variation in kind. A bit bigger, a shade darker, slightly rotated: differences of degree feel like naturally coherent. Differing shapes or colors becoming different in kind. Push such a difference in kind far enough and it stops being variety altogether and becomes a focal point.
Will more variety hide the repeat or reveal it? By itself, neither. A varied pattern can still repeat very obviously. Here's a moment from our pattern contest review where a submission gets the balance just right (in our opinion):
Complex enough that you don't spot the repetition straight away, coherent enough that it still feels like one design. It’s well-distributed variety.
Two techniques for judging variety:
- Squint: again, does the surface even out or do blotches and bands appear? And what are you aiming for?
- The tile flip: Switch between tile view and surface view in Repper. Variety that looks fine in a single tile can turn busy or stripey at surface level, and the other way around.
✏️ Exercise: Turn the variety dial
The amount of variety in your pattern is largely decided by your sample selection. Take one source image and make two patterns with the same tiling: one sampling a quiet, uniform area, one sampling the busiest area you can find. Flip between tile and surface view on both. Which one would you trust on a large surface?
Let's review some patterns
Time to put your new eyes to work. Below are five patterns, each with something worth noticing. My review and the improvement I made is hidden behind the . Take your turn first: squint, let your eye land, make your own diagnosis, and only then unfold to read my take and proposed improvement. Of course, you may have identified other issues, avenues for improvements, or even disagree with my take altogether, and that’s part of design :)
Exercise 1
Review & improvement (CLICK TO OPEN)
You probably noticed there is a little horizontal white line in the blue diamond. Did you also notice the little white corner in the grey areas? It doesn’t really seem to have a purpose, so if possible, it’s better to get rid of that. Otherise, the pattern has a nice balance of colors and coherence in shape and texture!
Here you see a slightly adjusted version with the white lines and dots gone. So nice!
But here’s one more approach: you don’t always have to reduce, you can also enlarge the small detail and really make it part of the design. Below you see a version where more of the white line and corners has been brought in. As a result, it now looks like a white bar that runes behind the red shapes and feels more in its place. While it makes the pattern busy (too busy?), it does actually create a more even spread of white elements over the surface, which makes for a more even look in case of many repeats.
Exercise 2
Review & improvement
I think that this pattern has too much going on: large flat areas, lots of detail in the cross with different kinds (not degrees) of shapes, plus some small orange bits around the floral shape that feel accidental.
What I’ve done is reduce the sample selection quite a bit. It creates a whole new pattern, so this is quite a big departure. But as you can see, there is variety in shape, size and color, but it feels like a more balanced pattern. Everything has its role and place. Notice how the small orange spiky bits from before are now larger and feel like they deserve to be there.
Exercise 3
Review & improvement
There isn’t anything necessarily bad here, just that the focal point is a rather boring pink blob and the whole pattern feels rather straight and uneventful. This pattern is the Facade (PMM), a real classic, and while it can make great patterns, I feel here we’d be better off with the Cairo tiling. It has the same basis, but rotates the contents to create a much more dynamic look. Here’s where you can find it in Repper and see it in action:
Here’s one version from the video. The central pink element is no longer drawing as much attention; we have more pink elements that are spread across, creating more variety and evenness at once. Two birds with one stone!
Exercise 4
Review & improvement
Is this one boring? Nothing stands out, little varies... but can be exactly right. A pattern like this sits beautifully in the background, covers a large area like a texture, and leaves room for other things (like a hero pattern or other visual elements in your design). If you do want it to carry more presence on its own, you can bring in variety. Here we kept texture the same, but by enlarging the selection sample, brought in more variety in shape (pointy vs round) and color (cold and warm).
Exercise 5
Review & improvement
The focal point is the flower, especially due to the black spots that draw you in. But my opinion is that the green border around it isn’t helping: it’s similar to the flower and so blends in, but without adding much. It also has an awkward blue triangle that is not connected to the rest of the design.
In my iteration, I’ve brought in more of that blue. Now the green band has more become part of the floral element and becomes almost a biological cell in a liquid. Also, the blue area has a dotted pattern like the flower (lucky coincidence in the source!), which repeats the texture of the flower, albeit a bit smaller, which creates a nice harmonious and coherent feel to the whole pattern.
Heroes and blenders
One last bit of vocabulary, because you've heard me use these terms. Pattern designers often speak of
- Hero patterns: detailed eye-catchers, often with a strong focal point and rich variety. In a collection, they are the focal point themselves!
- Blender patterns: the ones that often stay in the background, like the one in exercise 4. They don’t compete, but provide space for more prominent design elements to shine.
You can see how the two concepts inside harmony, focal points and variety, are what shapes both of those. Later in the masterclass, we'll use both roles together with secondary patterns to build full pattern collections.
Next, in the last two chapters of this module, we’ll go into the topic that gets many designers into patterns in the first place: color, and lots of it!
🔑 Key Takeaway
Harmony comes down to two questions: where does the eye land first (focal point), and how much does everything else look alike (variety)? There are no right answers, but use your own careful consideration to create designs that appeal to you, and oterhs!
🤔 Reflection exercise
Find a patterned surface in your home: curtains, a shirt, wrapping paper. Where does your eye land first, and do you think the designer chose that spot? Then squint: what survives?