Licence

Use it for anything

Whatever you generate on this site is yours to use. Commercial or not, modified or as it comes, in print, on screen, on products. No fee, no permission needed, no attribution required.

One limit

Do not redistribute the patterns as patterns. Selling or giving away an SVG pack, a clipart set, a template library or a generator built from them is the one thing this licence does not cover.

The short version: a pattern can be part of what you sell. It cannot be the thing you sell.

Three exceptions

Three patterns recreate existing works and are not mine to hand over. Joy Division and Joy Division Mesh follow the Unknown Pleasures cover, and Brockmann Beethoven Arcs follows a Müller-Brockmann poster.

They are here to show how the originals were built. Study them, take them apart, learn from them. Do not publish or sell them, least of all on a record sleeve or a poster, where the resemblance is the whole point.

Not covered

The pattern definitions behind this site (the node graphs) and the source code of the site itself are not covered by this licence.

Credit

Not required. If you would like to give it anyway, “Pattern from bookofshapes.com” is plenty.

And I would genuinely like to see what you made with it.

Every download carries this text as LICENSE.txt. Last changed September 2026. Questions, or something you made: say hello.