Light through paper

I’ve always wanted a gradient builder that makes gradients as beautiful as OpenAI’s. The ones on its old plugin cards: soft washes of cornflower and mint, one edge almost in focus, light leaking in from a corner.

For two years I tried to build one from Justin Jay Wang’s methods for random gradients. With Claude models, again and again. Every time: close, and wrong.

Last week I tried again with Fable 5.1. It blew my mind. Every card on this site sits on what came out. Try it.

The trick

Those gradients were never made by code. They were photographs an image model had dreamed from millions of real ones. Fable worked that out and stopped writing generators. Now every request to an image model carries three reference tiles and a paragraph that ends: “An abstract colour-field photograph, not a picture of a thing.” Three hundred and forty came back. A hundred and one were good enough to keep.

Use it

It’s open source: sinbad-io/gradient. One seed, one tile, forever.

import { Gradient } from "gradient";

<Gradient seed="project_42" style={{ aspectRatio: "2 / 1" }} />;