About Morphogeny

Morphogeny is a lab of generators. Each one grows a graphic-design style from code: you move the design choices that make the style, and it draws a new, original picture in it.

Who makes it

Morphogeny is made by Van Riel Online Services in the Netherlands, who also make Stylogeny, the atlas of 377graphic-design styles classified by their design choices. Morphogeny reads the atlas; the atlas explains what Morphogeny draws. Questions or mistakes: info@vanriel.eu.

Which styles get a generator

Stylogeny describes each style by 150 design choices, from modular grid to hand-lettering. Some choices are easy to draw with code (grids, repetition, geometric shapes, flat colour, halftone dots); others need a hand, a camera or a figure (painted illustration, calligraphy, photomontage). Every style gets a score from −1.5 to 1 for how much of its genome code draws well, with the hard choices counting one and a half times against it.

Of the 377 styles, 12 score at least 0.6, 29 at least 0.5 and 48 at least 0.4 (left out: the 39 styles described below). The first generators were picked from the top of that list for variety: patterns, posters, compositions, textures and type.

39 styles never get a generator and never lend their colours: those whose visual language belongs to living communities or carries sacred meaning, which Stylogeny itself never imitates. Other styles carry practical cautions, and those become rules: the animations stay below the WCAG flash thresholds (no area larger than a small part of your field of view flashes more than three times a second; every generator is tested for it, at its fastest and strongest settings), and animation only plays when you start it.

How a generator is made

• One rule set per style. Each generator is drawn by hand-tuned code that follows the style's own rules: De Stijl divides the field into planes held by black bars; Op Art repeats one module and distorts it. The rules are written on each generator's page.
• Controls are design choices. A control that sets one of the atlas's design choices carries its name and its key, such asform.op-pattern, and links to every style that makes the same choice. Plain settings (scale, density) are listed apart.
• Colours from the atlas. Every style's own palette, or any of 338 other styles' palettes, or your own.
• Finishing passes for what printing and screens do to a picture, each named after a surface choice in the atlas: misregistration, halftone, dither, glitch, grain.
• No copies. No generator, preset or default reproduces a particular artwork, and none is named after a person. Style names are used to describe; Morphogeny is not affiliated with any designer, artist, studio or movement it names.

Recipes: the same picture, every time

A picture is a recipe: the generator and its version, the variation number, the format, the settings, the colours and the passes. The recipe lives in the page's address, so a link brings the picture back. The same recipe gives the same SVG, byte for byte, in your browser and on Morphogeny's own renderer. When a generator's drawing changes, its version number goes up and old recipes keep their old drawing.

SVG files are true vectors, with letters turned into outlines so no font is needed to open them. The finishing passes work on pixels, so an SVG leaves them out; PNG and video keep them. Video is recorded in your browser as a seamless loop (WebM, or MP4 where the browser records it).

For agents and developers

Morphogeny has an MCP server for AI agents: list the generators and their controls, render a recipe to SVG or PNG, and find the nearest generator for any Stylogeny style. Each generator's page shows its recipe; a plain-text map of the site is at /llms.txt.

What is stored

Nothing you make leaves your browser: there is no upload, no account and no cookie. Your settings stay in the page's address. What you make is yours to use. Colours you save are kept in your own browser. Visits may be counted without cookies or personal data.

Sources

• Style names, palettes and design choices: Stylogeny (synced 2026-10-23, version e8a62faa).
• Fonts drawn by the generators: Inter, Jost, Archivo and Silkscreen, all under the SIL Open Font License, standing in for the commercial faces some styles used.
• The generators: Op Art (Op Art Graphics), Swiss (International Typographic Style), Bauhaus (Bauhaus), De Stijl (De Stijl), Memphis (Memphis Design), Concrete (Brazilian Concrete Design), Pixel (Bitmap & Pixel Graphics), Kinetic (Kinetic Typography & Variable Type).