Book of Shapes: a catalogue of generative SVG patterns

Nikolaj Sokolowski built a catalogue of over a hundred generative patterns and put them all on one page. Each one renders as clean SVG. Line drawings that look simple until you count the math behind them. The site is called Book of Shapes. It went around Hacker News this week, picked up 258 points, and the comments filled with people downloading patterns for wallpapers and for slides they wanted to stand out.

Eight families hold the collection: grid, radial, noise, flow, isometric, organic, distortion, physics. Grid has twenty-two patterns, the most. Physics has five. Each family page shows the result up front and sliders to the side, so you can change density, scale, rotation, and whatever parameters the pattern exposes before you download your version.

The names read like a tour of procedural art history. Joy Division, Truchet tiles, phyllotaxis, a halftone sphere, a resonance field. Two patterns carry the name of Josef Müller-Brockmann, the Swiss designer whose grid posters of the fifties defined the look of modern information. Others are pure whimsy: Scattered Cube Grid v3, Isometric Noise Field II, a cube helix. One is called Broken Ring. A fitting title for generative work, and a better one for a novel.

The thread argued about whether this counts as art and who it is for. One commenter gave the best answer: it is research. Not a product with a target user, just a working catalogue of what simple rules can draw, kept open so anyone who needs a pattern can find it. That is the useful part. When someone needs a hexagonal grid with rounded corners at two in the morning, the book already has it, as a clean SVG they can drop straight into whatever they are building.

Sokolowski built the book alone. He published every pattern so you can tweak parameters live in the browser and download the result as SVG. The whole collection sits at bookofshapes.com, free, with licence and privacy notes in the footer. Browse it like a library shelf: https://bookofshapes.com/

■ Filed from The Foundry: the tools wing of the city.