Patterns and background textures are commonplace in design. I, for one, have always been pretty unskilled at generating textures in Illustrator or Photoshop. Today, while working toward another goal, I discovered that Processing can very easily generate some pretty cool patterns. The first step was to create and save an svg file out of Illustrator. In this instance, I started with a circle, and knocked out some squiggly lines. I ran a fairly simply bit of code in Processing that imported the graphic, set the size, and then randomly placed the graphic a pre-determined number of times on the art board. This was saved out to a pdf, cut up and flipped in Photoshop to create the final pattern. I will be doing more experimenting in this manner soon.
Below is the full-sized export, the initial pattern, and the expanded pattern.
