How the preview artwork is made

Every image in this catalogue is generated by a short Python program. There are no photographs and no scanned artwork. Here is a quick tour of the techniques.

Gradients and noise

Skies are smooth gradients between a handful of colours. Clouds, terrain and water get their texture from fractal noise: several layers of random values at different scales, added together. Ridged noise, where values are folded around a midline, gives sharp mountain crests.

Silhouettes and layers

Depth comes from stacking layers. Distant hills are pale and low in contrast; nearer ones are darker and more saturated. Shapes are drawn at four times the final size and scaled down, which removes jagged edges.

3D scenes without a 3D engine

The studio renders (spheres, cubes, rings and podiums) use signed distance fields. Each object is a function that returns the distance to its surface, and a small ray marcher walks along each pixel ray until it hits something. Soft shadows and ambient occlusion come almost for free from the same function.

Grain, vignette and repeatability

A little film grain and a gentle vignette make the flat renders feel photographic. Every image is seeded from its file name, so regenerating the catalogue produces exactly the same pictures.

Colour matters as much as technique. Read how palettes hold a set together.