I used to think geometric patterns were just—you know, decorative filler.
Then I spent an afternoon in the Alhambra, staring at a wall panel that seemed to breathe. The tiles shifted depending on where I stood, and I realized the medieval craftsmen who designed these weren’t just making pretty shapes—they were encoding mathematical principles that wouldn’t be formally described in the West for another 500 years, give or take. Islamic geometric design, which flourished from roughly the 8th century onward across North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Spain, relied on compass-and-straightedge constructions to generate infinitely repeating tessellations. These weren’t random: they expressed concepts of unity, infinity, and the divine through symmetry groups that modern crystallographers would later catalog as wallpaper groups. Turns out, what I thought was just decoration was actually a visual language for cosmology, and that language is now everywhere in contemporary design—from subway tile patterns in Brooklyn to the loading animations on your phone.
Here’s the thing: the designers never wrote down explicit formulas. They worked through geometric intuition, using tools like the compass to subdivide circles into 6, 8, 12, or sometimes 10 parts, then overlaying rotated grids to create star polygons and interlacing bands. The resulting patterns—think of the intricate star-and-polygon motifs you see in mosque interiors—possess what mathematicians call “local symmetry,” meaning the design looks the same when you rotate it by specific angles.
The Mathematical Backbone That No One Talks About in Design School
Most graphic design programs teach you the grid. Maybe they mention modular scales or the golden ratio if you’re lucky.
But Islamic geometric patterns operate on a different principle altogether: they’re built from what’s called a “generative polygon,” usually a square or hexagon, which gets subdivided recursively until you have a skeleton of intersecting lines. Then—and this is where it gets weird—you selectively trace certain paths through that skeleton, ignoring others, to reveal the final pattern. It’s like those magic-eye puzzles, except the pattern was always there, hidden in the construction lines. Peter J. Lu, a physicist at Harvard, published a paper in 2007 showing that some 15th-century Iranian tile patterns used a technique called “girih,” which essentially functions as a quasi-crystalline tiling system—something Westerners didn’t “discover” until Roger Penrose’s work in the 1970s. (Lu’s findings were controversial, partly because some art historians felt he was imposing modern frameworks onto historical practice, but the math checks out.) Today, parametric design software like Grasshopper for Rhino lets architects generate similar patterns algorithmically, tweaking variables to produce endless variations—but the logic is still rooted in those medieval construction methods.
I guess it makes sense that this would appeal to modernist designers. The patterns are non-representational, which fits the 20th-century obsession with abstraction, but they’re also deeply structured, which satisfies the engineer’s brain.
Why Your Favorite Minimalist Brand Probably Stole This Aesthetic
Open any high-end design portfolio from the last decade and you’ll see it: interlocking hexagons, radial symmetry, geometric overlays with carefully calibrated negative space. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, and about a thousand fintech startups have used geometric motifs that—whether the designers knew it or not—echo Islamic tilings. The 2012 London Olympics logo (okay, not exactly beloved, but stay with me) used fragmented geometric shapes in a way that recalled the angular, interlocking forms of Mughal jali screens. More recently, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, designed by I.M. Pei, features a facade that’s essentially a three-dimensional interpretation of these patterns, with perforated stone panels that filter light in shifting geometries throughout the day. The appeal is partly aesthetic—these patterns photograph well, they scale across media, they feel both ancient and futuristic—but it’s also practical: the modularity means you can adapt them infinitely without losing coherence.
Wait—maybe “stole” is too harsh. Influence works both ways, after all.
The Part Where I Admit I Don’t Fully Understand the Spiritual Dimension
Honestly, I’ve read a dozen essays trying to explain the mystical significance of these patterns, and I’m still not sure I get it. The idea, as I understand it, is that the repetition and infinite extension of the designs reflect tawhid—the Islamic concept of the oneness and unity of God. Because the patterns can theoretically continue forever (even though any physical instantiation has to stop somewhere), they gesture toward the infinite. The absence of human or animal figures, which is common (though not universal) in Islamic religious art, means the focus stays on the abstract and the transcendent. Art historian Oleg Grabar wrote extensively about how these patterns create a kind of visual rhythm that’s supposed to induce contemplation, though I’ll admit that when I’m staring at a really complex eight-point star composition, I’m usually just trying to figure out how they constructed it, not achieving spiritual enlightenment. Still, there’s something to the idea that these designs function as a form of visual dhikr—meditative repetition. You see the same forms recurring, nested within each other, and it does create a kind of calm, almost hypnotic effect.
How Computational Design Is Bringing This Full Circle (Pun Semi-Intended)
Nowadays, architects and designers use algorithms to generate Islamic-inspired patterns at scales and complexities that would’ve taken medieval artisans years. Studios like Zaha Hadid Architects and Morphosis have used parametric modeling to create facades that adapt traditional geometric principles to contemporary materials—think perforated aluminum panels or CNC-cut wood screens. There’s a project in Abu Dhabi, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where Jean Nouvel designed a massive dome with a geometric pattern inspired by overlapping palm fronds, but executed as a complex layers of stainless steel and aluminum that creates a “rain of light” effect inside. The pattern was generated computationally but draws directly from the same principles of layered, rotated grids that you see in historical Islamic architecture. Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo, has developed open-source tools for generating Islamic star patterns, and his work has been used by everyone from jewelry designers to video game environment artists. The funny thing is, by encoding these patterns as algorithms, we’re kind of rediscovering the implicit rules that the original craftsmen already knew—except now we can tweak parameters in real time and spit out a thousand variations before lunch.
The Tension Between Authenticity and Appropriation That Everyone’s Too Polite to Mention
Look, there’s a conversation that needs to happen here, and it’s a little uncomfortable. When a Silicon Valley startup uses an eight-point star motif in their branding, are they engaging with Islamic visual culture, or are they just cherry-picking an aesthetic because it looks cool? I don’t have a clean answer. On one hand, these patterns have been part of global visual culture for centuries, influencing everything from medieval European floor tiles to M.C. Escher’s impossible geometries (he visited the Alhambra and was profoundly influenced). On the other hand, there’s something off about stripping a design tradition from its cultural and spiritual context and slapping it on a tech product that has nothing to do with those origins. Some designers and scholars argue that as long as the work is respectful and acknowledges its sources, cross-cultural influence is fine—it’s how design evolves. Others feel that certain motifs carry meanings that shouldn’t be reduced to mere decoration. Personally, I think it depends on the specifics: if you’re designing a community center in a majority-Muslim neighborhood and you incorporate these patterns thoughtfully, that’s different from using them as exotic set dressing in a luxury hotel lobby. But definately, the conversation is overdue.
Anyway, the next time you see a trendy geometric pattern—whether it’s on a coffee shop wall or a subway platform—you might want to look a little closer. Chances are, there’s a lineage there that goes back further than you think, encoded in circles and stars and polygons that some craftsman drew with a compass and a steady hand, centuries before anyone had heard of Illustrator or parametric design or even the printing press.
