Design polygon tessellations in your browser, on Android, or on your desktop.
Simple-polygon tessellations are tilings of the plane built from squares, triangles, hexagons and friends, meeting edge-to-edge at every shared boundary. Tessell.art is a place to design and explore them — the eleven Archimedean tilings, their k-uniform extensions, and aperiodic constructions in the same regime.
What you can build
Simple polygons with edge of unit length (or multiples thereof) are supported.
A small selection of aperiodic, regular and semiregular tilings the editor handles today — see the 11 Archimedean tilings for an illustrated tour and the notation primer for the labels.
What it does
Interactive editing
Click an edge to grow the tiling. Pick and drag a polygon and the editor keeps the geometry edge-to-edge as you go.
Mathematically rigorous
Validates edge-to-edge integrity. Surfaces symmetry axes and uniformity classes on request — never in your face.
Multiple outputs
Export to SVG for print and web, or to a DOT graph for further analysis. More formats to come.
Foundation libraries
The project ships reusable libraries that grew out of the
tessellation work. Today that means
ring-seq, a cyclic-sequence library available in
Scala, Rust and Python, and dcel, a planar-subdivision
library for Scala (JVM and Scala.js) that powers the editor’s
geometric model.
Who it’s for
- Artists and hobbyists exploring tilings as a creative pursuit.
- Designers who need exportable, edge-correct SVG.
- Developers who need the foundation libraries on their own terms.
Latest from the blog
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Tessella is now on F-Droid
The Tessella editor is now installable from F-Droid as an Android app — package art.tessell.editor, version 0.6.2, Apache-2.0, Android 10+, no permissions, fully offline. The same mobile-first editor, now an icon on your home screen.
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Add Copy: growing a tiling by its own symmetries
Version 0.5.0 replaces the old Double and Fan commands with Add Copy — four direct-manipulation tools (Translate, Rotate, Reflect, Glide reflect) that weld a copy of the tiling onto itself under a plane isometry. The release also harmonises the anchor markers and switches measurement to a colour-blind-safe palette.
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Doubling your way to infinity — and why it needs a parallelogon
Repeatedly welding a translated copy of a finite seed turns it into a candidate infinite tiling. The catch: it only welds seamlessly when the boundary is a parallelogon — opposite sides equal and parallel. The convex ones are the two shapes Fedorov classified in 1885.