Memphis pattern generator

What makes it Memphis

These are the design choices this generator makes or lets you set, as the Stylogeny atlas names them. Each links to every style that makes the same choice.

How this generator works

• Primitive solids and small marks scattered without a grid round one or two large anchors, with room to breathe; the repeat tiles seamlessly.
• Most surfaces are printed like laminate, each print in a colour picked to clash with its fill, outlined in black with a hard offset shadow.

What it never does:

• No copies of known laminates (no irregular worm-like squiggle print) and no furniture or object silhouettes: only primitives and its own prints.
• Never a grid of shapes, and shapes never pile into clutter: solids keep their distance, or overlap a little in the composition.

Every picture is a recipe: the variation number and the settings, kept in the page's address. Copy the link and the same picture comes back, in any browser. Random (or R) draws a new variation; ← and → step through them; S shuffles the settings; C borrows another style's colours.

About Memphis Design

Memphis was a design group first shown in Milan in 1981, whose furniture and printed laminates set out to mock tasteful modernism. Its graphic language is easy to recognise and hard to do well: primitive solids with black outlines, squiggles, confetti and dot grids, in colours chosen to clash, such as pink against black, mint against red and yellow against blue.

This generator scatters a short list of solids and marks, different for each variation, round one or two large anchor shapes, and spaces them so that nothing sits on a grid and nothing piles up. Most surfaces get a print of their own in a colour picked to clash with the fill, then a black outline and a hard offset shadow. The all-over arrangement keeps every shape inside the frame; the seamless repeat lets shapes run off one edge and back in at the other, so it tiles; the composition stacks a few large solids into a cluster with confetti around it.

The prints are drawn by the generator rather than copied from any laminate: dots, sprinkles, stripes, zigzags, waves, coils, graph grid and checks. Each variation picks its ground from the palette's lighter colours or a pale tint of one of them. You can change the balance of round and angular forms, how much is decorated, the colours and the shadow, or borrow a palette from another style.

Memphis Design in Stylogeny: 1981–1988, its lineage, its palette, real works and the full set of choices that define it.

Use it from code

The recipe below draws the picture this page opens with. Copy recipe gives you the one on screen. Agents can render recipes to SVG or PNG through Morphogeny's MCP server (morphogeny_render); the same recipe always gives the same SVG.

{
  "tool": "memphis",
  "v": 1,
  "seed": 7,
  "format": "portrait",
  "params": {
    "layout": "pattern",
    "primitives": 0.6,
    "squiggle": 0.6,
    "angular": 0.5,
    "laminate": 0.8,
    "colour": "clash",
    "shadow": 0.5,
    "outline": 3.5,
    "scale": 1
  },
  "palette": "memphis"
}

Open this recipe: /memphis/#seed=7&v=1. A plain-text version of this page:/memphis.md.

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• Concrete art generator: one module, repeated and turned by a rule
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• Kinetic type generator: your words filling the frame, moving along their weight and width