Intuitive and Effective Design of Periodic Symmetric Tiles

This paper presents a new approach for intuitive and effective design of periodic symmetric tiles. We observe that planar graphs can effectively represent symmetric tiles and graph drawing provides an intuitive paradigm for designing symmetric tiles. Moreover, based on our theoretical work to represent hexagonal symmetry by rectangular symmetry, we are able to present all symmetric tiles as graphs embedded on a torus and based on simple modulo operations. This approach enables us to develop a simple and efficient algorithm, which has been implemented in Java. By using this software, designers, architects and artists can create interesting symmetric tiles directly on the web. We also have designed a few examples of symmetric tiles to show the effectiveness of the approach.