Introducing tessell.art

Tessell.art is a place to design polygon tessellations — squares, triangles, hexagons and friends, arranged so every edge meets edge-to-edge. It is two things at once: an editor for making tilings, and a small set of foundation libraries we extracted from the editor along the way.

The editor

The editor runs in your browser at editor.tessell.art and as a native build for macOS, Windows and Linux. Pick a polygon, click an existing edge to grow the tiling, fan polygons around a vertex, mirror a region. Export to SVG when you are happy.

The editor is bilingual: English and Spanish. The site is English only for now, but the editor itself is not.

The libraries

Building Tessella surfaced one piece of code that was not really about tessellations: cyclic-sequence operations. Vertex configurations are sequences-as-rings, so we extracted that behaviour into ring-seq — and ported it to Scala, Rust and Python so it does not pull anyone into the JVM who does not want to be there.

dcel (a doubly-connected edge list, the data structure that powers the editor’s geometric model) is queued behind it. That one stays Scala-only, at least for the foreseeable future.

What is not here

This site does not teach tessellation theory from scratch. The notation primer explains how to read 3.6.3.6 and how the 11 Archimedean tilings work, but it assumes you arrived already curious.

What is next

A gallery of curated tilings, deep-link from gallery into the editor, and more… None of those are here yet; they are on the v2 list. The blog is the place we will say so when they land.