Look closely at a tiled wall, a carved door or a woven cloth in Central Asia and the same shapes keep returning. A star, a hexagon, a rosette and a border are enough to cover a whole surface. This picture story takes those shapes one at a time.

The pictures here are drawings by the newsroom, not photographs. They are deliberately simple and flat: they leave out the detail of any real building or object, so that the idea behind each pattern is easy to see.

Repetition and symmetry

The first idea is repetition. One small unit, such as an eight-pointed star, is drawn once and then set out again and again on a grid until it fills the surface without a gap. When the colour changes from one unit to the next, as in the first drawing, the grid gains a rhythm.

The second idea is symmetry. Most of these shapes look the same when they are turned or mirrored, which is why the eye finds them calm and orderly. The hexagon in the second drawing fits against its neighbours on every side, like the cells of a honeycomb; the rosette in the third spreads outward from a centre in rings.

Borders, frames and where to find them

A pattern also needs an edge. The border, often a zigzag or a row of triangles, closes a field of ornament and separates it from the next one, as in the fourth drawing. A frame does the same job for a single motif: in the fifth drawing each star sits in a square of its own.

A reader meets these ideas in many materials: glazed tilework on walls, carved wood on doors and columns, woven and embroidered textiles, and painted ceramics. The materials and the colours differ, and so do the local names for each motif. The logic of unit, repetition and edge stays the same, and once you have seen it, you start to notice it everywhere.