Mike Madsen, Sr. Director Golf Ball Research & Engineering at Titleist, tells us that creating a dimple pattern isn’t that hard, but creating a better one is extremely difficult. There’s no magic formula and R&D guys don’t always know what will and won’t work. You can’t be certain either way until you create the molds and put the pattern on an actual golf ball. Bottom line, creating a new pattern is a costly and time-intensive endeavor. To put all of this in context, over the last 20 years, Titleist has developed nearly 3,000 different aerodynamic patterns with only 1-2% of them making it on to a final product.