Design AtlasIsometric projection itself was formalised in 1822 by William Farish, an English engineer, as a drafting method that shrinks all three axes equally with no vanishing point. The "falling cubes" illusion tile people usually mean by this pattern predates even that — it shows up in 19th-century American quilting as the "tumbling blocks" pattern — and 20th-century op-art painters like Victor Vasarely revisited it on canvas. In web design it spread as a background pattern alongside the isometric-illustration trend on SaaS landing pages roughly 2016–2020.
The illusion is pure shading, nothing more. Three identical rhombi, each rotated 120° from the last, painted in light, mid, and dark tones — the brain reads that as a cube with a lit top, a shaded side, and a shadowed side. Which face gets the lightest tone flips the whole grid between reading as "cubes popping out" or "pits sunk in," a classic bistable illusion.
In SVG, split one regular hexagon into three rhombi from its centre (each rhombus spans the centre plus two consecutive hexagon edges, giving it 60°/120° corners), paint the three pieces light, mid, and dark, then repeat that hexagon across a honeycomb grid. The hexagon's width-to-row-height ratio has to stay at √3:1.5 or neighbouring hexagons stop meeting edge to edge.
When to use
Use for SaaS hero backgrounds, op-art mood graphics, and game/app icon grids. Weak tonal contrast just reads as a flat grid — keep the three shades clearly distinct.