We study the complementary design problem, which is to express the uniformity pattern of a q-level design in terms of that of its complementary design. Here, a pair of complementary designs form a design in which all the Hamming distances of any two distinct runs are the same, and the uniformity pattern proposed by H. Qin, Z. Wang, and K. Chatterjee [J. Statist. Plann. Inference, 2012, 142: 1170–1177] comes from discrete discrepancy for q-level designs. Based on relationships of the uniformity pattern between a pair of complementary designs, we propose a minimum...