  Introducing an in-plane magnetic field into Josephson junctions is of
fundamental significance in exploring a variety of interesting physical
phenomena. However, extra care must be paid in realistic experiments involving
an in-plane magnetic field, because trivial orbital effect due to, e.g.,
rippled structures can inevitably be introduced, which could produce false
effect confusing the expected physical phenomena. In this work, we report a
diamond-shaped evolution of the critical supercurrent in an in-plane magnetic
field in NbTiN weak-link Josephson junctions. Upon application of an in-plane
magnetic field perpendicular to the current, the superconducting interference
pattern exhibits a characteristic evolution, which manifests as a diamond block
diagram featured with each node opened and stretched out in a V-shape,
mimicking the suppression-recovery patterns of critical supercurrent related to
the Zeeman-driven 0-pi transition. However, the effect of Zeeman splitting
plays a negligible role due to the relatively small magnetic field involved in
our experiment. Therefore, we explore the trivial orbital effect of rippled
structures and further take into account non-uniform current distributions
pertaining in our junctions. We find that the ripples in combination with
specific current distributions can give rise to a similar evolution pattern as
the experimental observations. Our results serve as a caution that the combined
effect of rippled structures and non-homogeneous current distributions should
be taken seriously for experiments subjected by in-plane magnetic fields.
