Bringing 19th century ornamental tile illustrations into a 21st century web app | Hacker News Reader

Bringing 19th century ornamental tile illustrations into a 21st century web app

deepakg.com

There is (the project doesn’t seem to be actively pursued at the moment) a blog series documenting someone‘s journey in procedurally generating fantasy maps. For a while (a bit over a dozen entries from what I could find) he explored map borders which also seem to have some overlap with tiles.

This is the first entry: https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2019/02/map-borders-p...

Edit: here‘s an interesting post about Celtic knots:

https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/2019/05/map-borders-p...

I liked reading these posts because it's an interesting exploration into all of the subtle nuances that crop up when doing procedural graphics. You think "oh you just make it do $X", and then find out that $X is wrong in all sorts of ways that you don't realize until you see it happen.

isn't that programming in general?

Yeah, but with procedural graphics, you get a very visual display of those failures.

For those into this sort of thing, check out Oleg Dolya, who's been making map and building generators for a long time. His work is very impressive!

https://watabou.itch.io/ https://www.patreon.com/watawatabou

Really amazing! For those interested I highly recommend checking out Repper (https://repper.app/) for a fun playground without having to get too deep into the math.

Another AI driven one I saw recently was https://tilemaker.app/ which is fun.

I've also been playing a bit with tiling algorithms implemented as shaders

Ah repper reminds of the "kaleidoscope" effect in Pixelmator: https://www.deepakg.com/kaleidoscopic-dutch-houses

Will play with them. Thank you for sharing.

Nice. I've been tracing and painting a lot of tile designs recently and it has given me an appreciation for how even quite simple seeming designs have a lot more to them than it seems at first.

Balancing the ratio of space to color, playing with different widths of curves, and choosing an underlying grid - all very subtle but important in producing an interesting symmetrical pattern.

edit : Oh, and also I would recommend this book on tiles : https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/books/all-books/the-tile-book-157... it has some amazing examples, from many different historical periods and areas of the world.

I'll second that book recommendation, it's really quite excellent.

Thank you for sharing the book recommendation!

   Tiles at Newark Airport - what a missed opportunity!

Or perhaps installed incorrectly? Makes me think there’s a deeper story about those tiles.

That sort of thing absolutely kills me - like, maybe it’s intentionally avant garde, but I don’t think so, and I’m agog that at no point in that project was that caught and corrected. I know there was probably nobody involved there with the right combination of time, agency, or investment permitted to stop or fix it, but it actually hurts me a bit to see things like that.

This reminds me of a tool my friends made calle Escher Sketch, which allows you to create tiles https://eschersket.ch/ ... I've lost days playing with the program (and generating some pretty intricate art).

watching the video...

"let me turn of symmetry to show you the tools...blah blah blah"

"let me turn back on symmetry which is the point of the program..."

holy crap that's cool. just at the point i was ready to bail on the video.

If you like tiles AND electronic music, this one’s for you: https://youtu.be/s39SDfB1iyQ

I would guess what they've done here is used a high(ish) speed camera out the window of various transit modes, then taken still images of adjacent tiles from the video and stitched them together almost.. almost like motion stabilization, but with a per-frame offset? Hard to describe, but mesmerizing.

Pretty much, although i suspect quite a lot of it is crops from still images taken at leisure, rather than with a high-speed camera. The train ride is a framing device, rather than literally what happened.

Visually, it's sort of (sort of!) like a zoetrope:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoetrope

Of which there are linear forms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnjo_HVfVBc

Aeon posted this recently, which is similar (and similarly enchanting): https://aeon.co/videos/the-art-of-istanbul-dances-to-life-in...

What's really lovely about many of these more traditional types of tiles is that the color goes all the way through the tile – it doesn't just sit on the surface.

You can see how this is achieved here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSp5Tj4yYNc

This is fascinating. Thank you for sharing!

It does depend on the type of tile—for Moroccan zellige, it's just a surface coating made by dipping clay tiles in a liquid. Still makes gorgeous colors. However, those are generally one color per tile, versus the style here where each tile has multiple colors. And they're ceramic tiles instead of cement.

The catalog from which I took the tiles mentions their manufacturing process in passing:

> The colours are at least one-quarter-inch thick, backed up to a full thickness of seven-eighth inch thick of pure granite sand and Portland cement, subjected to a high pressure in steel moulds, after which the tiles are immersed in water for a certain period, to render the material thoroughly sound, in the usual way adopted for a concrete of the highest quality. Being so constructed, the material — after being thoroughly matured — is quite impervious to moisture, is frostproof, and is eminently adapted for any class of flooring, — particularly where great durability is of utmost importance.

I wonder if I'll ever come across any in real life in some old building in Europe and if their hope of "great durability" extended to 120+ years :-)

Aha! I was wondering what the "granitic" aspect was, thank you. These are basically cement tiles, but with the backing cement made with granite sand. These were the final (?) evolution of a line which started with medieval encaustic tiles:

https://www.theantiquefloorcompany.com/short-history-encaust...

As for finding some, there is unfortunately no mention of Threlkeld in the Database of UK Architectural Ceramics Locations:

https://tilesoc.org.uk/tacsdb4/tacsdb__LOCATIONS_list.php

I am sure there are lots around in the UK though. Tiles are everywhere.

Off the top of my head I've seen tiles of this type in cathedrals in Salisbury and York originally installed in the late 19th century. They looked to me to be in perfect condition.

I LOVE THIS.

I am not capable of doing so - but I would really love to see this applied to Guilloche patterns [0] as typically recognized in money...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloch%C3%A9

Huh, guilloché patterns remind me of the work this guy does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyI2tke3smI

by hand, though! He's an amazing drawer.

Its the same, thought there are so many elaborate algos that produce the most amazing outcomes ; the Mosques are representations of this - the geometry in them is so deep, we cant even read them - but its all math.

https://i.imgur.com/Y0ulGyb.png

https://i.imgur.com/5bNJaBP.png

https://i.imgur.com/FzoYuA0.png

https://i.imgur.com/oOMg5Ki.png

Those are some interesting detailed examples, yes. The construction methods are still known for many patterns, however:

http://gilleain-torrance.net/assets/images/blog/orosi-trypty...

for example. There is a greak book http://broug.com/books/ - the 'Islamic Geometric Patterns' one. I also like the videos by Mohamed Aljabani : https://m.youtube.com/@BawabatAlkhatAlarabi which show the constructions as animations

Does anyone else have trouble looking at these patterns? Does that mean something?

When viewing these repeating patterns, I get a kind of very uncomfortable visual disorientation, almost like vertigo: hard to describe.

Lovely!

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