Delightful Designs: A Coloring Book of Magical Patterns

Coloring books for adults are a new fad. As I write this, nine of the top twenty best selling books on Amazon are coloring books. That is not nine of the top twenty craft books or design books. That is nine of the top twenty books of any kind.

I have released a few coloring books as offshoots of the maze books I have designed, and this fall these offshoots are selling better than the maze books by a considerable margin. (For me a book that sells five copies in a month is a spectacular hit. Only rarely does one of my books crack the top 100,000 list on Amazon.) So when I finished up the FabFours typefaces, I decided to add another book to my coloring book offerings. It is titled Delightful Designs: A Coloring Book of Magical Patterns. Below is the cover.

Here are examples of what is inside. I have kept the lines thin to aid coloring.

 Each of the designs in made from a family of four tiles that share the same identically shaped edge.

 Some of the adult coloring books have incredibly intricate designs. The designs in my coloring books are fairly simple, but they have interesting geometric properties that the intricate designs often lack.

The book features a result I discovered while studying tessellations. There are sets of four shapes that can be tiled in a checkerboard-like pattern of tiles and voids, and the voids must take the same four shapes that the set of tiles has. The result is two-, three- and four-tile tessellations, that is, patterns that tessellate with two shapes, or three shapes, or four shapes. The tiling above, for example, has two distinct shapes in it, while the first two have three distinct shapes in them. When I discovered the patterns that these sets of shapes could make, it seemed magical, and hence the name of the book.

Delightful Designs is available on CreateSpace and Amazon.