Terrazzo

Terrazzo is a floor before it is a pattern. The story usually told puts it with Venetian builders who set offcuts of marble into a cement bed, poured it flat, and ground the whole surface down until it polished. Every visual property the style now carries comes straight out of that process. The chips are angular because they are broken sections of stone rather than drawn shapes. They sit at every possible rotation because nobody placed them. They are various sizes because the offcuts were. And the pattern never repeats, because a poured floor has no tile. What holds it together is the ground: a plain, quiet field of cement that the chips read against, which is why terrazzo stays legible where a busy pattern would not.

Screens got it secondhand, through furniture. The Memphis group of the 1980s put speckled laminates on tables and cabinets, and when the wider Memphis revival arrived so did the speckle, first on packaging and stationery and then as a web background sometime around the end of the 2010s. It sits beside memphis-design as one of that movement’s exports, and beside halftone and risograph as a texture register that carries a physical process into a flat medium. The difference worth holding onto is that halftone and risograph imitate a printing artefact, something that happened to an image on its way to paper, while terrazzo imitates a material.

Drawing it convincingly is mostly about resisting three shortcuts. Chips are polygons with straight edges, not dots: circles read as confetti, which is a different and much more juvenile pattern. Use a small number of chip sizes, roughly a large, a medium and a small, rather than a continuous range, because real aggregate comes graded. And keep the colour count low, three or four over a neutral ground, since terrazzo gets its calm from the field rather than from the chips. The genuinely hard part on the web is the repeat: a tiled background image announces its own grid within a couple of tiles, so either draw the scatter once at the size it will actually be seen at, or make the tile large enough and irregular enough that the seam falls outside the viewport.

Two cautions. The pattern is a background, not a surface: body text set directly on chips loses contrast against whichever chip it happens to cross, so put content on a plain card and let the terrazzo stay behind it, exactly as a real floor sits under the furniture. And be aware of what the register dates. A speckled ground places work in a specific and fairly recent window, which is useful if you want that association and expensive if you do not, so reach for it when the reference is the point rather than as a neutral way to fill space.