Abstract: A mosaic tile design and manufacturing system is comprised of a mosaic design application, a network server and a tile cutting apparatus. A mosaic artist can use the mosaic design application to specify the placement, color and shapes of a plurality of mosaic tile comprising a mosaic design. The tile shapes can be a combination of standard and non-standard shapes, and the design tool can generate instructions that can be applied by the server to the tile cutting apparatus to control the cutting apparatus to make custom tile cuts that result in a tile with a non-standard shape.

Abstract: A vector based mosaic design system has a graphical processing module, a display module, a plugin application module and memory, and it operates to receive an original input image and mosaic design information from an artist. The plugin module has logical instructions that operate on the information received from the artist to determine the position of curves that are offset from a mosaic design region boundary or feature curve, and the plugin also operates to determine the positions and dimensions of tiles in courses that are defined by the positions of feature curves and curves that are offset from them.