About

PlaidMaker is an online tool for making plaid patterns.

You can create patterns for free and either download them to your computer or save them to the site. If you’d like to save private patterns you can sign up for PlaidMaker Plus.

History

After studying the thread pattern of my favorite plaid shirt, I theorized that its pattern could easily be represented, pixel by pixel, with a gif image.

I took a close look at my shirt and noted the number of threads, their colors and their directions. With MS paint and the pencil tool, I drew each pixel of the pattern and copied and pasted it repeatedly. This, however, was a tedious process and I found a much more efficient way to make plaids with Photoshop using layers, masks and patterns.

The Photoshop method was still not good enough for me; I had always wanted to write a program to do it. The algorithm, I knew, was extremely simple but I didn’t know how to create images. Finally I learned PHP and the GD library which gave me the tools to make my program.

Plaid close up

About the Founder

Sean Hi, I’m Sean Conaty and I developed this site. I’m a software engineer in Portland, Oregon. I like to be creative especially so when it involves building a tool that lets others be creative too. Thanks for stopping by! —@seanconaty

Contact

hello@plaidmaker.com