I’ve been fascinated by Islamic geometric designs for years. I recently came across a couple of useful and interesting sites to help people understand how these designs are built:
- Mohamad Aljanabi’s Youtube channel – Mohamad teaches traditional geometric design construction through his Islamic Geometric Pattern School, using the traditional methods he was taught by craftsmen as a teenager. These videos give a really good introduction to the basic traditional design process.
- Pattern in Islamic Art – A library of Islamic designs collated by David Wade, with an amazing photo gallery organised by region / location. I’m using his gallery references as a design identifier.
Understanding Traditional Design Construction Method
There are many explanations of how to develop the various Islamic geometric designs, and they are typically built up using some form of grid built using multiple circles etc. I was intrigued when I came across Mohamad Aljanabi’s videos, as he shows a simplified approach that is ready made for tessellation. He also has an excellent video describing why the traditional method generates proper designs versus the modern grid method. He summarised it with a set of very simple rules:
- The base construction should not be overly complicated.
- The construction method should allow you to specify the width of the pattern in advance.
- The resulting design must maintain proportional balance between all derived design elements.
- An overall pattern is developed from a square or rectangle block that we tessellate to get the overall design.
- The base design block should be just a quarter of the pattern which when mirrored vertically and horizontally generates the whole overall pattern.
- Construction should only require straight lines and circular arcs to develop the pattern.
The Analysis Challenge
After looking at a number of designs in the pattern library, I started to see the underlying base square in some of the designs, so I decided to start attempting to develop the base construction method for these designs. The links below will take you to the analysis and design notes for each of the patterns I’ve completed.
Richard Cullinan's Blog 