Psychedelic poster generator

What makes it Psychedelic

These are the design choices this generator makes or lets you set. Where a choice says “Measured”, Morphogeny changed that control alone, kept everything else, and measured the picture: a number that moves with the choice, not proof that the picture reads as the style.

How this generator works

• The photo’s tones become many nested bands, cut along their outlines and filled with flat inks of near-equal value, so the edges between them vibrate.
• Every outline, the echo rings in the ground and the words are bent through one smooth flow (a whiplash stream, a swirl, a melt or a ripple), so the picture reads as one liquid surface.
• Words are set wide and heavy and swollen to fill a shape, then melt with the picture.

What it never does:

• No copy of any poster, artist’s lettering or venue: the words are the visitor’s own, and no default names an event.
• No embedded photo: every colour is a cut shape, and the photo never leaves the visitor’s device.
• Motion only breathes the flow around its still, a few units either way, so crowded bands never flicker.

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 Psychedelic Poster

Psychedelic posters came out of the counterculture of the mid-1960s, from the ballrooms of San Francisco and the underground press of London. Letters melted and swelled until they filled whole shapes, the curves of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession returned at hallucinatory strength, and fluorescent or complementary colours were set side by side so that the edges vibrated. Reading one was meant to be slow: the poster held you while you worked it out.

This generator treats your photo the same way. Its tones become many nested bands, cut along their outlines and filled with flat inks of close value, so the edges between them shimmer. Every outline, the echo rings in the ground and your words are bent through one smooth flow (a whiplash stream, a swirl, a melt or a ripple), so the whole picture reads as one liquid surface.

With animation on, the flow keeps moving and the loop ends where it began. It stays slow and below the flash limits. Your photo is read only in your browser and is never uploaded.

Psychedelic Poster: 1965–1973. What the controls mean: Help.

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": "psychedelic",
  "v": 1,
  "seed": 1,
  "format": "portrait",
  "params": {
    "flow": "whiplash",
    "strength": 0.45,
    "bands": 7,
    "colour": "polychrome",
    "split": false,
    "aura": true,
    "text": "",
    "lettering": "swell"
  },
  "palette": "psychedelic"
}

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