2023

The Pag Lace app on a touch-table screen: a finished round lace design in white on the blue design panel beside the column of lace patterns, with a close-up of a square design tiled from one motif.

Pag Lace

Design your own Pag lace

A touch-table app at St. Margaret’s Benedictine convent in Pag where visitors design their own Pag lace, round or square, and the nuns can make it for real.

The Benedictine nuns of St. Margaret's convent in Pag have kept the island's lace-making tradition alive for centuries. In 2019, their plan to bring Pag lace closer to visitors through digital technology won Zagrebačka banka's Moj Zaba Start competition. We built the centrepiece: an app in which anyone can design their own Pag lace on a touch table, in Croatian or English.

The Pag Lace title screen: “Create Lace” and “More About Lace” buttons over a pale blue lace pattern, with the seal of St. Margaret’s convent in Pag and a credit to Zagrebačka banka.

Design your own lace

On a 50-inch touch table in the convent, visitors start a design in one of two forms: round or square.

The “Create Lace” screen asking visitors to choose a style, with a round lace and a square lace to pick from.

A round lace grows from the centre out. Every ring, from the centre to the picot edge, has its own set of patterns: tap a ring, choose a pattern from the column beside the design, and the lace is drawn into place.

A round design in progress: the centre and two rings of white lace on the blue design panel, the next ring highlighted and its patterns in a column on the left.

Any ring can be changed again, and the size adjusted, ring by ring out to the picot edge, until the design is theirs.

A finished round design: rings of white lace motifs from the centre out to a picot edge, on the blue design panel.

A square lace is tiled from a single motif and framed with a border band, and a slider sets how many tiles it has.

A finished square design: one lace motif repeated across a five-by-five grid inside a lace border.

The best part comes afterwards. A finished design can be printed and ordered, and the nuns make it by hand, as real Pag lace.

The story of Pag lace

Next to the designer, a multimedia section tells the story of Pag lace in films, photographs and texts: its history, and the technique, sewn with a fine needle and thread over a paper pattern on a hard cushion.

The “More About Lace” screen: a film of a lacemaker’s hands sewing Pag lace on a cushion, above the History and Technique tabs and a text on how the lace is sewn.

How we did it

The app runs in Unreal Engine. Every building block and icon started life in Adobe Illustrator, so the patterns stay crisp at any size, and each ring sweeps into place around the circle as it is chosen.

Built with
  • Unreal Engine
  • Cinema 4D
  • Illustrator
3DEducationalGameMultitouch