Generate a Checkerboard PNG

any size · any cell size · two colours · tileable · nothing uploaded

The grey-and-white grid that means "transparent" in every image editor, a test pattern for checking texture mapping and scaling, or a plain chessboard. Set the dimensions and the square size and download.

Make it tile

A checkerboard repeats seamlessly as long as the width and height are both even multiples of the cell size. With a 16 px cell, 512×512 tiles perfectly (32 cells each way); 500×500 does not, because the last column and row are cut short and the pattern jumps when it repeats.

For a CSS background you only need the smallest repeating unit — two cells by two cells. At 16 px that's a 32×32 PNG of a few hundred bytes, set to background-repeat: repeat. Generating a 4000 px sheet when a 32 px tile would do is a common and avoidable waste.

Uses beyond the transparency grid

Scaling and mapping tests. A regular grid makes resampling problems obvious immediately — moiré patterns, uneven cell widths, blurring, off-by-one seams. Drop the result into Resize or Pixel-art upscale and you can see at a glance what each interpolation method is doing.

A transparency backdrop you control. Composite a transparent PNG over this with Overlay images to show a client exactly which parts are see-through — an editor's own checkerboard never exports.

Chessboards and game grids. Set the two colours to something wooden, and use a cell size that divides the board evenly by eight.

The transparency option is worth understanding: ticking it leaves the "A" squares fully transparent and draws only the "B" squares. That gives you a checker mask rather than an opaque pattern — useful as an overlay, and meaningless as a JPG, since JPG has no alpha channel.

FAQ