June 5, 2026
Palette town, drama down
Linear Cosine Palettes(2025)
Math-made color art sparks a tiny civil war: dreamy curves or crowded chaos?
TLDR: A blogger showed off a simple way to generate smooth color schemes and used them to make abstract computer art. Commenters were split between “please explore this more” and “these are way too crowded,” while one hilarious take said the images looked like computer chip photos.
A blogger set out to do the impossible: write a short post. Instead, they served up a delightfully self-dragging intro, a simple trick for making flowing color gradients, and a gallery of computer-made art that immediately sent the community into review-panel mode. The big idea is easy enough for non-coders: pick some starting colors, let a wave-like pattern blend them, and you get smooth palettes that can be used to make abstract art. Simple in theory, wildly judged in practice.
And oh, the reactions. One camp was ready to greenlight the experiment, especially the more swoopy, curve-heavy pieces. As one commenter put it, the “lissajous ones” felt promising and worth pushing further, basically the online equivalent of yelling “drop the sequel!” But there was also a brutally concise design critique: the Mondrian-style images were called “too dense, too crowded”. Ouch. Tiny art blog, huge reality-TV energy.
Then came the funniest twist: another viewer said the artworks looked like CPU die photos—basically the inside of a computer chip—turning what might have been gallery-wall abstraction into accidental hardware-core chic. That joke somehow also feels like a compliment? So the mood is clear: people are into the color experiment, but they’re absolutely going to roast the compositions while they’re at it. In other words, the palettes may be smooth, but the comments are not.
Key Points
- •The article presents a cosine-based method for generating continuous color palettes, adapted in R from ideas attributed to Mike Cheng and Inigo Quilez.
- •The palette method uses four length-3 vectors and evaluates a cosine function as a parameter varies from 0 to 1.
- •The author provides an R function, `cosine_palette()`, that samples base colors, computes palette values, and converts them to RGB output.
- •A helper function, `shade_strip()`, is used to visualize generated palettes as image strips.
- •The palettes are tested in generative artworks made with the author’s `subdivision()` system using seeds 11 through 22, with mixed but generally usable results.