Floor Tile Design - A Photoshop Tutorial

How To Design A Flor Tile

R.BIRD has occupied 4 uniquely designed offices in its 24-year history and, in every case, we’ve satisfied a fetish for creating something unique out of ordinary floor tiles in our kitchenettes. See our current floor design above.

We often use a simple technique we mastered in the practically prehistoric days of computer graphics when special effects were born of imaginative thinking and not from menu items. The technique is commonly known as “pixelization.” Here’s a simple step-by-step using Photoshop and a favorite photograph.

1. Open your subject image in Photoshop and change Mode to Indexed Color. This mode disables Photoshop’s built-in anti-aliasing - the smoothing of image edges. We don’t want that. Tiles are not soft around the edge, right?

2. Oops. Forgot to mention this one. While changing Mode to Indexed Color, limit the number colors to match the palette you have available in tile. If your carpet or tile collection only comes in 16 different colors, limit the Indexed colors to 16 as well.

3. Now, scale your Image Size by a uniform percentage. Try 10 percent for a start, both horizontally and vertically.

4. Last step: scale the image by an inverse proportion to the one you just used in the previous step. In this case, 1000 percent x 1000 percent.

Voila!

If you changed mode correctly in step 2, you can now open up the image Color Table and modify the resulting palette to match as you please to what you have to work with in carpet, vinyl tile or ceramics. Using Select Color Range will also do the trick.

For a more abstract result, start with a reduction to 5 percent or less. (Find someone good at math for the inverse proportion.) For a mosaic look, start with a reduction of about 20% and an inverse of 500%.

(No, there’s not a missing letter “o” in this post’s title. We refer to Interface Inc.’s Flor system for carpet tiles.)

How about a quilt?!

There are 6 comments so far | Post a comment

Richard Bird | Feb 1, 2007

Popularity for this post has been HUGE. I’d love to know how you all are taking this seed and running with it! Please post here or send your own unique results by email. We would all like to see.

aditya omer | May 16, 2007

there are no step by step tutorial with picture

Oly | Jun 18, 2007

Very cool. But, how do you go about printing them? Do you send them to Flor?

Richard Bird | Jun 18, 2007

Actually, Oly, that’s the beauty of this approach. You can use any material at any scale. Just modify the process to account for how many colors - of anything - that you have to work with. (See Step 2.)

We could be talking about a wall mosaic, for example, or bathroom tiling.

photoboy | Jul 7, 2007

I understand photoshop and how to use all of the tools to create and manipulate images, but your tutorial is not very informative. Might I suggest to give the reader a visual aspect for each of the steps that you have outlined?

Richard Bird | Jul 9, 2007

Great question, photoboy and aditya.

The technique for pixelization that I’ve described here is no less than 25 years old. It’s ancient.

I’ve simply applied the idea to a real-world application: mosaic tile or other limited palette applications.

To create, record and publish a visual, step-by-step walkthrough on this IDEA is something I would like to do, but absolutely have no time for. I’m sorry.

Think through the basics I’ve described. I believe you can easily find your way to results.

If not,

Try Lynda” !