317 symbols, so no two colors ever share one
A chart is only as readable as its symbols. Ours are measured for visual weight, picked to look unlike each other, and there are always more of them than your palette needs.
Why the symbol set matters
A cross stitch chart is a grid of symbols, and the legend tells you which thread each one stands for. That makes the symbol set one of the least glamorous and most consequential parts of a pattern. If two symbols look alike at print size, you will misread them. If one is much heavier than its neighbors, your eye keeps snagging on it. If two colors share a symbol, the chart is simply wrong.
The curated set
These 181 glyphs are the hand-picked core of the library — geometric marks, a set of letters, and a few stars. A pattern with up to 181 colors draws entirely from them and never touches a number.
Chosen for distinctiveness
Every glyph is rendered to a bitmap and compared against every other one, and any pair that came out too alike was cut — near-duplicate hatched squares, boxed letters that differed only by the letter inside. The sequence is ordered so each new symbol is as unlike the ones already chosen as possible, which gives small palettes the widest margins between their symbols.
A shape turned on its side or flipped over counts as the same shape. On a chart you read from every angle, ▲ and ▼ are one symbol pointing two ways, not two symbols you can trust yourself to tell apart.
Chosen for consistent visual weight
Each glyph is measured for how much of its cell it actually fills. Some are light and open, some are bold, and that spread is used deliberately rather than smoothed away — see how symbols get assigned, below.
Numerals, for large palettes
Once a palette outgrows the curated glyphs, numbers take over — 200 of them.
…and on to 200.
These are generated rather than hand-picked, which is what lets the library extend as far as a palette needs. They sit inside the curated set's weight range, so a number never jumps off the page next to the shapes around it. Every numeral also shares one square outline and one cap height, so 7 and 170 print at the same size and stroke weight instead of one looking bolder than the other.
Numbers earn their place on a large palette. Matching a symbol on a chart with hundreds of colors means scanning a legend of near-identical marks, and a number turns that search into a lookup.
How symbols get assigned
You never have to think about this, but it is worth knowing what happens when you convert a photo.
- The busiest colors get the lightest symbols. A heavy mark repeated across a whole region turns the chart solid and is exhausting to read.
- Rare colors get bolder symbols. Those are your confetti — a handful of cells scattered across the canvas. A mark that pops is what lets you find them.
- Colors that touch, or that are easy to confuse, get symbols that look different. Where two threads sit side by side on the chart, or are two shades you can barely tell apart, their symbols are kept well apart.
- Rotated or mirrored versions of a shape count as the same symbol. So ▲ and ▼ are never used as two different colors side by side.
- Every color gets its own symbol. Always. The library labels up to 317 colors, and the editor will not let a pattern go past that.
Confetti gets the symbols that pop
The obvious approach is to give your busiest colors the best symbols. We do the opposite at the rare end, on purpose. You learn a background color's symbol in the first ten minutes and never hunt for it again — and a heavy mark repeated across a whole region turns the chart solid and is exhausting to read. The single scattered stitches are the ones you search for, so those get the boldest, most distinctive marks in the set.
Neighbors and lookalikes, unlike symbols
Two shades you can barely distinguish — adjacent steps in a gradient, two near-blacks — are exactly the pair where the symbol has to carry the whole distinction, because the colors give you no help. The same goes for two colors that meet along an edge: that border is where you count stitches, and where two similar marks blur into one. Most pattern software assigns symbols in palette order and leaves that to chance.
We check it instead. Colors that touch on the chart and colors close enough to be confused are matched with symbols that look clearly different, and a shape is never paired with a turned or flipped copy of itself.
You can override any of it. Click a color, pick a different symbol, and if that symbol is already spoken for the two colors trade places — so a manual change can never leave a duplicate or a color without a symbol.
Everywhere a chart is drawn
The same set is used in the on-screen editor, printed PDF charts, PNG chart export, and the symbol column of the thread legend — so what you proof on screen is what you stitch from on paper.
Symbol questions
What do cross stitch symbols mean?
Can two colors end up with the same symbol?
No. Stitchmate assigns a distinct symbol to every color in the pattern, and the library has 317 of them — the editor will not let a pattern hold more colors than that. If a symbol were ever about to repeat, the export stops rather than shipping an ambiguous chart.
Can I change which symbol a color uses?
Yes. Click any color in the palette panel and pick a different symbol from the library. If the one you want is already taken, the two colors swap, so you never end up with a duplicate or a color without a symbol.
Why do some patterns use numbers as symbols?
Numbers appear only on patterns with more than 181 colors, once every hand-picked glyph is in use. On a large palette a number is also quicker to look up in a long legend than one more geometric shape.
Do the symbols print well at small sizes?
That is the constraint the library is built around. Each glyph is measured for how much ink it puts down relative to the others, so no symbol reads as a heavy blob or a faint smudge next to its neighbors on a printed chart.
Are these symbols standard across cross stitch software?
There is no standard. Every pattern maker picks its own symbol set, which is why the legend matters. Patterns exported from Stitchmate carry their symbols with them, so a chart opens the same way in other stitching apps that read our files.