De Stijl generator

What makes it De Stijl

These are the design choices this generator makes or lets you set, as the Stylogeny atlas names them. Each links to every style that makes the same choice.

How this generator works

• Only horizontals and verticals: black bars divide the field into rectangles of unequal size, with one large empty plane weighed against a few small coloured ones.
• Colour is a handful of flat planes at the periphery, never a pattern; the bars, not outlines, separate every plane.

What it never does:

• No regular grid of small coloured squares, no centred or mirrored division, and no large colour plane in a top corner answered by small ones along the bottom (a well-known arrangement).
• No diagonal except when the whole system is turned 45°; no gradients, texture or curves.

Every picture is a recipe: the variation number and the settings, kept in the page's address. Copy the link and the same picture comes back, in any browser. Random (or R) draws a new variation; ← and → step through them; S shuffles the settings; C borrows another style's colours.

About De Stijl

De Stijl (Dutch for "the style") was a movement founded in the Netherlands in 1917 around a magazine of the same name. Its painters, architects and designers reduced a picture to its elements: horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles, the three primaries, and black, white and grey. They wanted balance without symmetry: a large white plane held against smaller, denser patches of colour.

This generator builds pictures the same way. Black bars divide the field into rectangles of unequal size. One large plane stays empty, and a few smaller ones, usually at the edges, take a flat primary colour, placed so that the whole holds in equilibrium. For each variation number it grows many compositions and keeps the best balanced, so you get a new picture each time, not a copy of a famous painting.

About one variation in five turns the whole system 45°, as in the later Elementarist compositions; the diagonal axis setting fixes it upright or turned. Type a title to set it in block letters built from rectangles, as on the movement’s posters, with the bars running on beside it. With animation on, the bars drift slowly and the planes rebalance in a seamless loop.

De Stijl in Stylogeny: 1917–1931, its lineage, its palette, real works and the full set of choices that define it.

Use it from code

The recipe below draws the picture this page opens with. Copy recipe gives you the one on screen. Agents can render recipes to SVG or PNG through Morphogeny's MCP server (morphogeny_render); the same recipe always gives the same SVG.

{
  "tool": "de-stijl",
  "v": 1,
  "seed": 8,
  "format": "portrait",
  "params": {
    "divisions": 8,
    "asymmetry": 0.65,
    "colours": 3,
    "bar": 22,
    "tilt": "seed",
    "fields": "white",
    "ends": "edge",
    "balance": 0.6,
    "title": ""
  },
  "palette": "de-stijl"
}

Open this recipe: /de-stijl/#seed=8&v=1. A plain-text version of this page:/de-stijl.md.

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