About This Design

Every visit to this site gets its own colour and texture. Here's this visit's roll, and how the rolling works. Tap the die or roll again and watch it change.

Where It Came From

The 2008–2010 iain.co.nz picked a random rgb() colour on every page view, under a 100×100 pixel tile of dark grain called duller.png and a 1600×900 spotlight. Both images are back, recovered from the Wayback Machine along with everything else here. The comment boxes had two opposite corners rounded; so do the cards, buttons and the die on this version.

The Rules

No middle ground. Three visits in four get a bright colour with near-black text; one in four gets a deep colour with near-white text.
Always readable. Every roll is lightened or darkened until the text has at least 7:1 contrast, the strictest level in the web accessibility guidelines (WCAG AAA). It's measured on the colour as it looks through the texture, since duller alone takes about a quarter of the light out.
Four textures: duller (the original), film grain, halftone dots and a fine hatch, picked at random.
Everything tilts. The giant watermark letter and the date stamp land at a new angle each time.

By the Numbers

About 1.1 million different colours: around 815,000 bright and 290,000 deep. (Estimated by sampling: hue, saturation and lightness are random, and many land on the same rgb() value.)
About 4.4 million colour and texture pairs. At one roll a second, seeing them all once takes about seven weeks.
With the watermark letter's tilt (561 angles) and position (53), and the stamp's tilt (241), about 31 trillion different-looking pages, or 190 trillion counting the die's six faces.
The die never shows the same face twice running.

Type

Headlines are Bodoni 72 or Didot; text is Iowan Old Style or Palatino; code is the system's monospace. All of them come with the phone or computer, so nothing is downloaded.

Still Changing

This design is being worked on. These numbers describe it as of November 2026.