Guilloché Patterns

Published on 10 October 2008

If you wanted to design your own bank notes or passport you might consider using a Guilloché pattern as one of your anti-counterfeiting measures.

I first heard about Guilloché patterns in a recent post over at the Ministry of Type blog run by Aegir Hallmundur. Guilloché machines (also known as geometric lathes) have been used since the 17th century by watchmakers and goldsmiths, such as Fabergè, for for ornamentation.

Using the set of Hypotrochoid equations Aegir describes I've built a little Flash app to experiment with the various parameters. Click the picture below to play.

guilloche 1223715406

Download the AS3 source code and play with the Guilloché explorer.

Tags: Flash, Math, Patterns   Last updated: 20 October 2008

8 Comments

  • Tomek commented at 13 October 2008 at 12:57

    I will now try to generate some banknotes :)

  • Harish commented at 21 December 2008 at 09:29

    This is real cool.
    And... nice one, Tomek :)

  • Daniel Brooks commented at 22 December 2008 at 01:52

    Please please please add a save to file function!!

  • Tom commented at 22 December 2008 at 07:14

    Daniel - if you press 's' you can save the image out as a JPEG.

  • Tim Poston commented at 2 January 2009 at 01:32

    Remarkable control board!
    Very stylish, but on this MacBook, dark grey on darkish grey is close to unreadable.

    Which control is which?

  • Tom commented at 2 January 2009 at 07:35

    Thanks Tim. If you select white from the bottom colour picker then the text/background colour combination will reverse to make it more readable.

  • John Towsen commented at 6 January 2009 at 01:19

    Is there (or will there be) an animatable version for After Effects?

  • Tom commented at 6 January 2009 at 07:12

    John, at the moment there isn't a version for After Effects I'm afraid.

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