---
name: Terrazzo
slug: terrazzo
category: surface
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A background pattern of small irregular chips scattered on a plain
  field, copied from poured stone flooring and used flat and multicolored behind
  interface content.
aliases:
  - name: terrazzo pattern
  - name: chip pattern
  - name: speckle pattern
  - name: confetti texture
tags:
  - illustration
  - retro
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - dot-grid-background
    - grainy-gradient
    - memphis-design
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso: []
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Creative Market: Design Trend Report, Terrazzo"
    url: https://creativemarket.com/blog/design-trend-report-terrazzo
  - title: "Desenio: Design focus, terrazzo"
    url: https://desenio.com/design-magazine/trends-2/design-focus-this-fall-terrazzo/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: a speckled chip pattern used as a background fill
---

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](/memphis-design) as one of that
movement's exports, and beside [halftone](/halftone) and [risograph](/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.