Luckily, the principle of field plans is simple: two dominoes take quite exactly a square piece on the floor. So if you have a square grid on a paper, like it can be found in most notebooks, you already have the grid for you field plan.

As you can tell from the picture, I like planning my fields by hand. Most domino-builders hardly ever do that though, and I "have to" use the computer for difficult fields as well because I'm not really good at drawing.

So usually, you'll plan fields using Microsoft Paint or GIMP. Search for a picture on the internet that shows the thing you want to build (there's no legislation for it, but I'm sure it counts as Fair Use to take a copyrighted picture as your model for a domino field plan... and it's pretty unlikely anyway that the author of the picture will see your domino field, recognize his picture and sue you for it), copy it into the programme and then just "trace" it by coloring the squares of the grid. Here's a more detailed tutorial by CDT's field planner Simon Stümke.

We domino-builders are lucky to have somebody in our community who isn't only an expert in this field, but also in computer sciences: Tim Weißker, the guy behind domino-tim.de, has written a field planning programme for Microsoft Excel. Apart from providing you with a grid and a color palette, it has several nice additional functions. For example, it will count how many dominoes are included of which colors, which can be important to know if you're not sure whether you have enough dominoes of a certain color. Another awesome idea by Tim was to make the programme create a "field protocoll" as shown on the left. It is a different "transcription" of the field where that tells you exactly which dominoes to set up - for example, when building Row 1 of the field on the left, you see you need to set upt 85 black dominoes, then 1 brown, 1 red, 1 orange domino, and then 9 white ones. Especially on complicated fields, that saves you a lot of time and almost lowers the chance you get lost in the field plan and build something wrong because made a mistake counting some dominoes on the plan.

You can download the programme here (it's completely free) and might want to watch this tutorial Tim made to explain the functions of the field planner:

This trick can make fields more interesting: By putting the lines a bit offset to each other and then toppling them from opposite directions, you have a surprising effect when the image or the letters on the field only appear as soon as the field topples.

It's one of the techniques that is actually really easy, but can turn out to be much trickier than you though. All you do is that you plan the field normally and then set up every second line moved sideways by four dominoes. When those moved lines topple into the opposite direction than the others, that shifting is neutralized and the image is set back together the way it originally looked on the field plan. Especially for viewers who aren't domino experts themselves, this can be an astonishing effect because the change from nonsense image to something that makes sense happens basically in one instant.

Here's the bad news: Chances are high you'll mess it up during the build-up. The problem is that you don't really notice when you do something wrong because you don't know what the field is supposed to look like (and even if you do because you modified the field plan, it's still difficult to see mistakes in a picture that looks chaotic anyway). Maybe I particularly suck at that, but the facts are that I have hardly ever managed to make a crossover field without a mistake.

TimDomino's field planner helps a lot there, because with the field protocoll, these mistakes happen less frequently.

Another thing you need to pay attention is to leave enough space between the lines and, even more important, build them very straight. They mustn't touch each other while falling of course, because it ruins the effect as well if one line is triggered into the wrong direction.

The effect isn't even used that frequently, which I don't really understand - it's a great effect for basically every field. The tricks was hardly ever used on Domino Day, although one reason for that might be that on huge fields, the effect doesn't really work because you can make out the shape of the field before the toppling. It can still be a beautiful falldown effect, as this field of 12 000 dominoes by millionendollarboy proves.

By the way, this is one of the very oldest techniques - meaning that is was already used by Bob Speca, the first notable domino-builder, in his first perfomances in the 70's. He didn't have pictures on the fields yet though, he just had eight rows (it was always eight rows, don't ask me why) falling in this pattern. He called the trick "Integration"; there's no consistently used name today yet. I've heard "crossover" a few times for it and think it's a good name.

This technique that I invented makes it possible to split a field using very little space. It might look chancy to you, but it's actually really reliable.

La Ola was also found first by me, and a friend who doesn't build domino today anymore. As the name indicates, it topples like a wave.

This angle probably shows better how the trick is done: The first line is toppled normally. One domino leans against it, so when the line topples, the domino topples as well and triggers the next line, which has a domino leaning against it as well, and so on.

This is not really a reliable technique (I'd estimate the chance that it works at 85%), it's just really really beautiful ;-)

To conclude the topic, here are two exotic toppling techniques that are hardly ever used. This is yet another invention by me and it probably looks like it would do anything except topple the lines. But try it out, it does work ;-)

This weird technique was used in the "Psychedelic" project in Domino Day 2006. I've only seen it rarely since then. It's not exactly secure, usually it misses some lines, so it's not the first technique I'd recommend. The reason they used it in Domino Day was probably that the fields were winding and that is easier to handle with this technique than with others.

In order to end up with an accurately round spiral, it is helpful to stand back every once in a while and take a look if and where it is misshapen.

In my eyes, it looks ugly if a spiral doesn't topple line by line, so you should make sure you leave enough space between the lines, especially if you use low-quality dominoes and if the spiral topples from the inside out, which isn't done very often though.

Spirals are among the techniques that make lots of variations possible. It is especially beautiful if many of them topple at the same time, and then maybe with a color change included.

This kind of wall topples quite fast, hence the name. Also, here's a neat trick you can use them for...

Cross two speedwalls like this, and with a bit of luck (it works at about four out of five attempts), the second wall will remain standing when the first one topples through it, as if it was a ghost. (Watch that here.) It's one of my favourite tricks which I also happen to have invented.

There are countless ways to have two lines cross each other - this one is by far the most elegant one I know. It almost looks like a normal line and topples nearly always. It was first presented on YouTube by xXDominoMasterXx.

This technique was originally called Slowstones, but that name can be misunderstood because it usually means something else (dominoes that are prepared in some way, for example filled with sand, so that they fall really slowly). It can be used as a color-changing effect.

This so-called T-Setting is the fastest domino technique in existence - ask Guinness World Records: At Domino Day 2008, they detected that a line of 30 meters built with this technique took just 4.21 seconds to topple (that is about seven times as fast a a normal line), which still wasn't fast enough though to beat a runner it was competing in the live show.

In order to make the dominoes fall that fast, you should put them even slightly more closely together than on the photo.

The technique is actually so simple that it is surprising it took the Domino Day team until 2007 to get this idea.

Just like normal lines, Sonimod lines can form spirals...

...or fields...

...or this - generally almost anything that you could build with normal lines.

Apart from the variations, I want to present my own one here (which doesn't have a name).

Note that if you won't get this set up if you try it like this...

...but that you need two dominoes to hold the next one.

For this easy kind of towers, I'll use the name 1x1 towers, taking over a suggestion by millionendollarboy.