Patternizer

Featured: Blue Cubic Space

I haven’t featured a pattern in awhile (totally my fault), so now I have a few queued up. I’ve also been playing quite a bit of Bejeweled while I wait for the subway, and this pattern really fits in, with a very jewel-y feel.

This one really does it for me. It has great colors and a real sense of depth. Really really awesome. I said “Oh wowwwwwwwwwwww look at that” when I first saw it.

Blue Cubic Space

-Matt

Featured: Bulldog

I haven’t featured a pattern in awhile, so I have a few queued up. This first one comes from briandotnet. I have no idea why I called it Bulldog, but there we are.

Nice colors, love the red highlight.

Bulldog

-Matt

Why Patternizer doesn’t output CSS

Despite numerous Tweets and posts to the contrary, Patternizer does not output CSS. It outputs JavaScript to be used with the patternizer.js library. So why is this, when CSS is built-in and has no overhead? In short, it looks like crud at non-ordinal angles (not 45 or 90). Let’s take a look at an odd angle with both approaches.

CSS Gradients

JS Canvas

So which one would you choose? Or maybe, which one would your designer choose? CSS gradients don’t anti-alias their edges with their current implementations, so we get those choppy edges. Some color combos make that less evident, but to me, they are not up to snuff. I wish they were, and maybe in the future they will be, but I wouldn’t hold your breath—using gradients for stripes is kind of an abuse-case more than a use-case.

But…If enough people make enough noise, I’m open to doing a CSS export too. So make some noise if you can’t live without it.

-Matt

Featured: Blur

Here’s a new Featured pattern, coming from Nexii Malthus. No, your eyes aren’t failing (ok, they might be failing), this pattern has a pretty clever blur effect going on. I won’t spoil where the black is coming from, you’ll just have to figure it out yourself.

Blur

Enjoy and keep them coming!

-Matt

Let’s all get Featured

First off, I wanted to give a special thanks to all those who seeded the featured gallery. David Desandro kicked things off with some wildly creative, colorful work. Simurai blew my mind with a realistic weave. JP33 delivered a highly polished “button-down shirt” quality pattern. And of course, Melisa Christensen. Props to all for blazing the trail.

80% of the fun of making a tool like this is seeing what crazy things people come up with.

And on that note, here’s a new featured pattern. It comes from @sickdesigner and I like it so much because its a representational isometric view style pattern, something I would have never considered.

Sky Skraper Side

If you want to be featured too, give me a holler

-Matt

Let’s do this!

Patternizer lives!

It started as a small stripe script I wrote based on the Cicada Principle article. From there I said “I wonder what would happen if I made a plaid mode.” And the rest is history. Months later, a fancy front-end UI and a back-end user system pull it all together.

I have a lot of ideas for Patternizer that I hope to put into future releases. Here’s some of the things rolling around in my head :

• Exporting an image.
• Pattern History, probably with thumbnails.
• Pattern titles to keep things organized.
• If enough people want it, I can make a CSS gradient output. CSS gradients for patterns don’t look good at non-ordinal angles though, so don’t expect it to look nice.

If you have any ideas, or want to convince me to do these sooner than later, holler at me.

It’s a really fun tool, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!