318 symbols, so no two colors ever share one
A chart is only as readable as its symbols. Ours are measured for visual weight, ordered for distinctiveness, 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 118 glyphs are the hand-picked core of the library — geometric marks, a set of letters, and a few stars. A pattern with 30 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. No two symbols in the set are closer than 70 points apart on a 576-point scale, and the sequence is ordered so each new symbol is as unlike the ones already chosen as possible.
Small palettes get the widest margins: on a 10-color pattern the closest pair of symbols sits 204 points apart. That gap is what lets you tell two stitches apart at arm's length.
Chosen for consistent visual weight
Each glyph is measured for how much of its cell it actually fills. The set runs from 18% to 61% coverage, averaging 42%, 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 fill the middle of it.
…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 at 49% average coverage against its 42%, 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 117 print at the same size and stroke weight instead of one looking bolder than the other.
Numbers earn their place in the middle of a large palette. Matching a symbol on a 200-color chart 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.
- Colors are ranked by how much of them you will actually stitch. The color covering the most canvas comes first.
- Background colors get the lightest symbols. A heavy mark repeated across a whole region turns the chart solid and is exhausting to read.
- The rarest colors get the heaviest, most distinctive symbols. Those are your confetti — a handful of cells scattered across the canvas. A mark that pops is what lets you find them.
- Lookalike colors are pushed onto unlike symbols. Two threads you can barely tell apart get two symbols you can tell apart instantly.
- Every color gets its own symbol. Always. The library holds more symbols than the 256-color maximum a pattern can reach.
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 heaviest, most distinctive marks in the set.
On a 200-color pattern that works out to about 31% ink coverage on the busiest quarter of colors and 52% on the rarest quarter. The numerals fill the middle, where colors are common enough to learn but not so rare you have to go looking.
Lookalike colors, 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. Most pattern software assigns symbols in palette order and leaves that to chance.
We measure it instead. Every pair of colors close enough to be confused is checked against how alike their two symbols look, and symbols are traded between colors until the risky pairs are separated. On a 200-color pattern that takes confusable symbol pairings from 61 down to 6.
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 holds more symbols than the 256-color maximum a pattern can use. 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 colors than there are curated glyphs, and they fill the middle of the palette. The busiest colors keep the lightest symbols so large areas stay readable, and the rarest colors keep the heaviest, most distinctive ones so scattered single stitches are easy to find. 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.