Book of Shapes: A Library Of Patterns You Can Take Apart

"Book of Shapes" is a library of SVG patterns. It is not a shopfront. Every pattern in it can be pulled apart and remade.

Nikolaj Sokolowski built it. He lives in Bremen. By day he works at a design studio there, and the site sits in the middle of a longer practice that also includes generative faces and a poster engine. The collection itself dates to 2025.

Open the front page and you get about ninety patterns laid out in rows. Woven grids. Flow dots. Truchet arcs. Isometric cubes and noise fields, sorted into families: grid, flow, radial, noise, isometric, distortion, organic, physics. The site counts 57 patterns in the public write-up, and the live grid shows more than that now.

The trick is the editor behind it. Every pattern is a small graph. Nodes sit in a chain: drop points onto a grid, add noise, join them, filter, stack. Around 103 node types exist. Sokolowski marks some of them public, and those become the sliders you can grab on the site. Move a slider and the pattern redraws in front of you. Then you download the result as SVG.

There is a second layer. Push the randomness harder and add a set of strict layout rules, and the same system produces posters in the Swiss school manner. The generator rolls stage, color, size, and placement from a fixed pool, then keeps correcting the layout until no rule is broken: elements must share axes, text must claim the empty space. Those posters are meant as inspiration for how the patterns could sit in a real layout.

The licence is worth reading. Anything you generate on the site is yours. Commercial or not, print or screen, no fee and no attribution. One limit: do not repackage the patterns as patterns. A pattern can be part of what you sell. It cannot be the thing you sell. Three entries recreate other people's work, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures cover and a Müller-Brockmann poster among them, and those are marked as study pieces, not yours to publish or sell.

Everything is downloadable as SVG, so the output drops straight into a cutting machine, a laser, or a print file. Start here: https://bookofshapes.com/

■ Filed from The Foundry: the Fern, Fire wing of the city.