Pixel pattern generator

What makes it Pixel

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

• Everything sits on one coarse grid of square cells, each one colour from a small fixed palette; there are no curves, gradients or soft edges.
• Areas stay flat; dithering (ordered or error diffusion) only fills the narrow seams where two colours meet, and 8×8 fill patterns stand in for tones.

What it never does:

• No characters, logos or names from any game or computer, and no copy of a known pixel picture: sprites, landscapes and screens are grown from the seed.
• Palettes are named by what they are (four-shade green LCD), never by a machine. Animation changes any cell at most a few times per loop, so nothing flashes.

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 Bitmap & Pixel Graphics

Bitmap graphics come from the screens of the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when a picture was a grid of a few hundred square pixels and a palette of two, four or sixteen colours. Designers worked inside those limits: every dot sat on the grid, curves became stair steps, and tones the palette lacked were faked with patterns of dots, known as dithering.

This generator keeps the same rules. Each picture is one grid of square cells, and each cell takes one colour from a small fixed palette: a calm few colours of the palette chosen for the page, or a hardware-style set such as 1-bit black and white or a four-shade green LCD. Areas stay flat, and dithering (an ordered dot pattern or error diffusion) is kept to the narrow seams where two colours meet, as it was when every dot was placed by hand. Landscapes are built from flat silhouettes around one sun or moon and its reflection; the tiles use 8×8 fill patterns as tones, the sprites are mirrored figures outlined and shaded cell by cell, and the text screen is set in a bitmap face with block characters.

Nothing here copies a game, a computer or a known picture: the creatures, landscapes and screens are grown from the variation number. The SVG keeps each colour as a single shape with crisp square cells, ready to scale to any size.

Bitmap & Pixel Graphics in Stylogeny: 1977–1995, 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": "pixel",
  "v": 1,
  "seed": 3,
  "format": "portrait",
  "params": {
    "mode": "any",
    "pixels": 64,
    "hardware": "chosen",
    "colours": 4,
    "dithering": "ordered",
    "rhythm": 3,
    "symmetry": false,
    "label": "Bitmap"
  },
  "palette": "bitmap-pixel"
}

Open this recipe: /pixel/#seed=3&v=1. A plain-text version of this page:/pixel.md.

Other generators

• Op Art generator: stripes, checks, rings and wedges that swell and turn
• Swiss grid poster generator: grid posters set in a neutral grotesque
• Bauhaus poster generator: circles, squares and triangles in tension on a diagonal, held by bars and dots
• De Stijl generator: planes of primary colour held by black bars
• Memphis pattern generator: scattered shapes dressed in squiggles, dots and zigzags
• Concrete art generator: one module, repeated and turned by a rule
• Kinetic type generator: your words filling the frame, moving along their weight and width