Digital wallpaper tiles of proliferation and continuity

This paper looks at William Morris’ wallpaper designs from the Victorian era to study their intricate figural compositions and pattern transformations. As a field of graphic design, wallpapers combine organizational lattice structures and repetitive tiles that are used to decorate interior surfaces. Using growth in his designs, Morris organizes both tile boundary and its transformation to derive continuous patterns. This technique combines standardization of elements and cheapness to execute intricate, affordable solutions that could be extended to digital pattern applications. Deriving from this historical and theoretical analysis, the paper presents a computational model that can generate digital tiles using Morris’ method of blurring tile boundaries through growing figures. Various pattern elements such as leaves, flowers and veins are considered with parametric variability to create new pattern designs. The resulting continuous patterns are presented using parameters and colors extracted from some of Morris’ original designs. The paper aims to reveal the digital nature of Morris’ patterns and their potential extension to other design domains.