The random places things come from

Story behind my website's new colour palette

Hi 👋

Yesterday I did a pretty big redesign to my website and added a new colour palette 🎨

I thought it was quite interesting where it came from though. You might think that I sat down and thought really hard about colours. Or went looking for a palette I liked.

I've tried that before and never really got anywhere.

Instead it sort of came out of nowhere.

Let me explain.

First, I came across this blog by Aleksandr and I thought, "that generated grid thing looks pretty cool"

image

"I wonder how hard that is to make?"

So then I went looking for computer generated art like that one (something I've always thought was really cool).

I found this amazing guide on frontend.horse that went thought the process of building randomised art grids like these.

image

So I thought "this is awesome, I want to build something with this". So I got to work modifying the code in that guide to run as a CLI script (because I wanted to save the output images as files, not show them directly to a user).

The example code works by fetching a colour palette from nice-color-palettes and picking a random one.

The first thing I did when I got the code working in the CLI was to generate an image for every single colour palette - because "why not?"

Then I started looking through them and one immediately caught my eye.

image

"That looks like the palette I want to use on my website!"

So then I picked out those colours, tweaked them a little, and applied them to my website 🎨

I'm really happy with the result.

I also used the script to generate new random images for every new post I write. Adds a pop of colour to the website!


I thought that was an interesting experience of how sometimes to achieve goal X we don't need to focus on it. Sometimes we can end up at our goal even when we go in a different direction.

See you tomorrow 👋