Lattice Pattern Design
Pattern Origins
This pattern started as six equilateral triangles inside a hexagon – following on from my more traditional, Moorish style pattern called Hexagons.
Black Bands
I wanted the design to be as graphic as possible so divided up each pair of triangles into thirds, adding two bold, black, stripes between the three white bands.
Experiments with Lattice
I have also experimented with combining lattice panels with two or three stripes – shown in the slideshows above. Which version do you prefer?
Defining the Pattern Repeat
The pattern repeat for this design is surprisingly small – see below. Whenever I try to avoid including edges if possible, so as here the pattern repeat cuts through the middle of solid areas of colour.
Outputting the images
With most of my designs I output the designs as 300dpi. TIFF files. This produces the crispest reference image file. For the pattern repeat, I re-save the TIFF file at the same size in webp format in a selection of lossy-quality values in 10% increments from 10% to 100%. I then check through these files to see how small I can make the file before the quality is unacceptable. I then use that setting for all the rest of the images of that pattern design
Creating the files
As TIFF files cannot be uploaded onto WordPress websites. I re-save the Tiff files as webp format which creates the smallest file size possible. One last vital point is that resizing the TIFF file rarely works as the scaling the edge of the image often has not whole pixels which cause a white glitch in the pattern repeat.
Testing The Pattern Repeat
All of my full screen patterns use actual real pattern repeats. I can define the scale of the repeat using the website’s CSS file (Cascading Style Sheet). This is the ideal way to test if a pattern repeat works. It is also a quick way to see what the pattern looks like at different scales. Sometimes a large scale pattern looks totally different when shown much smaller.
