Click / drag to paint. Everything you draw wraps around, so it always tiles seamlessly.
Drag the preview to pan. Scroll / pinch to feel the pattern flow. Export a high-res PNG of any region.
Seamless patterns are everywhere — wallpaper, fabric, tiles, textile prints, game level textures, and the decorative border of a thousand manuscripts — yet almost nobody understands why a pattern tiles without a seam. Most "pattern generators" just hand you a finished image. Tessella flips that: you paint a single unit cell yourself, and the app shows the group of symmetry operations (translations, reflections, rotations) that turns your tiny drawing into an infinite, perfectly seamless field. It is a small window into the mathematics of the 17 wallpaper groups.
Tessella is a browser-based studio for designing seamless wallpaper patterns. You paint on a square tile, pick one of the 17 classical wallpaper symmetry groups (p1, pmm, cmm, p4, p6, etc.), and watch your motif repeat across a large pannable canvas with the correct reflections, rotations and offsets for that group. You can scrub through every symmetry group live, tune the tile scale, and export the result as a high-resolution PNG or an SVG tile.
Every wallpaper group is a set of geometric operations that tile the plane. Tessella pre-renders the unit cell in every symmetry variant each group needs and stamps the motif's full orbit onto every visible cell, so the result carries exactly the symmetry of the chosen group. Try an asymmetric doodle — you can see each operation in action:
The preview renders the tile (or its flipped/rotated variants) on a grid whose origin, row-parity and cell indices are computed from your pan offset and scroll zoom. Because the base tile is itself a seamless unit, the combined result has no visible seams regardless of which group you pick. The painted tile is stored as an offscreen 2D canvas (the unit cell) and stamped onto the preview canvas each frame.