What happens to a designer when the tool starts doing the thinking? Yaheng Li poses this question in his MFA thesis, “Different Ways of Seeing.” The CCA grad published a writeup about his project in Slanted, explaining that he drew on embodiment research to make a point about how tools change who we are:

Whether they are tools, toys, or mirror reflections, external objects temporarily become part of who we are all the time. When I put my eyeglasses on, I am a being with 20/20 vision, not because my body can do that it can’t, but because my body-with-augmented-vision-hardware can.

The eyeglasses example is simple but the logic extends further than you’d expect. Li takes it to the smartphone:

When you hold your smartphone in your hand, it’s not just the morphological computation happening at the surface of your skin that becomes part of who you are. As long as you have Wi-Fi or a phone signal, the information available all over the internet (both true and false information, real news and fabricated lies) is literally at your fingertips. Even when you’re not directly accessing it, the immediate availability of that vast maelstrom of information makes it part of who you are, lies and all. Be careful with that.

Now apply that same logic to a designer sitting in front of an AI tool. If the tool becomes an extension of the self, and the tool is doing the visual thinking and layout generation, what does the designer become? Li’s thesis argues that graphic design shapes perception, that it acts as “a form of visual poetry that can convey complex ideas and evoke emotional responses, thus influencing cognitive and cultural shifts.” If that’s true, and I think it is, then the tool the designer uses to make that poetry is shaping the poetry itself.

This is a philosophical piece, not a practical one. But the underlying question is practical for anyone designing with AI right now: if your tools become part of who you are, you should care a great deal about what those tools are doing to your thinking.

My wife is a huge football fan—Kansas City Chiefs, if you must know—and I’m one too (go Niners!), but too a lesser degree. I just really hope the Seattle Seahawks don’t break out the super-ugly green highlighter-colored Action Green uniforms when they face off against the Patriots in Super Bowl LX.

Anyway, sports teams are some of the best examples of legacy brands, steeped in history, and with legions of literal fans. It interesting how legacy brands evolve—especially ones where the audience feels genuine ownership. And sports teams are the extreme case. Mess with a logo that fans have tattooed on their bodies, and you’ll hear about it.

Natalie Fear talked to several designers about what makes NFL logo updates succeed or fail. Paul Woods, president of AIGA Los Angeles:

The updates that work tend to be quieter. The Chargers’ continued refinement of their iconic bolt or the Vikings’ measured refinements show that evolution can be about better execution, not louder ideas. Improved proportions, stronger typography, and systems that scale across digital, broadcast, and physical environments matter more than novelty.

Better execution, not louder ideas. That’s the whole thing, really. The temptation with any redesign is to justify the effort by making the change visible. But visible change and meaningful improvement aren’t the same thing.

Woods again:

Appeasing fans does not mean standing still. It means understanding what they actually care about.

This applies well beyond sports branding. Any time you’re working on a product or brand that people have history with, the job isn’t to make your mark—it’s to make the thing better without breaking what already works.

Michael Vamosy, founder of DEFIANT LA, puts a finer point on the challenge:

Fans are much more forgiving of poor design choices from the past than they are of design improvements built for the future.

That asymmetry is worth sitting with. Nostalgia protects old mistakes. New work gets no such grace period.

I’ve been licensing fonts for my entire career. Hundreds of them over the years, whether it was Adobe’s Font Folio, or fonts from Emigre, House Industries, T-26, or Grilli Type. I always assumed that when I paid for a font license, I was paying for something with clear intellectual property protection—like software or music.

Turns out that assumption might be wrong.

Matthew Butterick, a copyright litigator who also happens to be a type designer and author of the great reference, Practical Typography, lays out why digital fonts probably aren’t protected by U.S. copyright law:

Fonts have traditionally been excluded from U.S. copyright protection. This principle was judicially affirmed in the 1978 case Eltra Corp. v. Ringer (“typeface has never been considered entitled to copyright”).

The type industry has operated for decades on a workaround: register fonts as software programs rather than as typefaces. A 1998 case, Adobe v. Southern Software, seemed to validate this approach. But a recent ruling in Laatz v. Zazzle pokes holes in that reasoning. Butterick on the implications:

To those in the type industry who have staked a lot on the Adobe case, that last sentence might be a doozy. The Laatz court’s perspective debunks decades of wishful thinking about the breadth of the Adobe opinion. Under the Laatz view, unless you “created the software that produced the font programs”, you don’t fall within the scope of the Adobe ruling.

That distinction is wild. If you designed a typeface using FontLab or Glyphs—as most type designers do nowadays—you might not have the copyright protection you thought you had, because you didn’t write the software that generated the final font file.

Given all this legal uncertainty, how does Butterick run his own type foundry? He’s refreshingly pragmatic:

My business necessarily runs on something more akin to the honor system. I try to make nice fonts, price my licenses fairly, and thereby make internet strangers enthusiastic about sending me money rather than going to pirate websites. Enough of them do. My business continues.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the legal questions here—I’m not a lawyer or a type designer. But as someone who’s spent a lot of money on fonts over the years, I find it fascinating that the whole edifice might be built on shakier ground than any of us realized. And yes, I absolutely want to support the type designers who sweat the details by giving them cash money.

Google’s design team is working on a hard problem: how do you create a visual identity for AI? It’s not a button or a menu. It doesn’t have a fixed set of functions. It’s a conversation partner that can do… well, a lot of things. That ambiguity is difficult to represent.

Daniel John, writing for Creative Bloq, reports on Google’s recent blog post about Gemini’s visual design:

“Consider designer Susan Kare, who pioneered the original Macintosh interface. Her icons weren’t just pixels; they were bridges between human understanding and machine logic. Gemini faces a similar challenge around accessibility, visibility, and alleviating potential concerns. What is Gemini’s equivalent of Kare’s smiling computer face?”

That’s a great question. Kare’s work on the original Mac made the computer feel approachable at a moment when most people had never touched one. She gave the machine a personality through icons that communicated function and friendliness at the same time. AI needs something similar: a visual language that builds trust while honestly representing what the technology can do.

Google’s answer? Gradients. They offer “an amorphous, adaptable approach,” one that “inspires a sense of discoverability.”

They think they’ve nailed it. I don’t think they did.

To their credit, Google seems to sense the comparison is a stretch. John quotes the Google blog again:

“Gradients might be much more about energy than ‘objectness,’ like Kare’s illustrations (a trash can is a thing, a gradient is a vibe), but they infuse a spirit and directionality into Gemini.”

Kare’s icons worked because they mapped to concrete actions and mental models people already had. A trash can means delete. A folder means storage. A smiling Mac means this thing is friendly and working. Gradients don’t map to anything. They just look nice. They’re aesthetic, not communicative. John’s word to describe them, “vibe” is right. Will a user pick up on the subtleties of a concentrated gradient versus a diffuse one?

The design challenge Google identified is real. But gradients aren’t the Kare equivalent. They’re not ownable nor iconic (pun intended). They’re a placeholder until someone figures out what is.

When I worked at LEVEL Studios (which became Rosetta) in the early 2010s, we had a whole group dedicated to icon design. It was small but incredibly talented and led by Jon Delman, a master of this craft. And yes, Jon and team designed icons for Apple.

Those glory days are long gone and the icons coming out of Cupertino these days are pedestrian, to put it gently. The best observation about Apple’s icon decline comes from Héliographe, via John Gruber:

If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.

Posted by @heliographe.studio on Threads

Seven Pages icons from newest to oldest, each one more artistically interesting than the last. The original is exquisite. The current one is a squircle with a pen on it.

This is even more cringe-inducing when you keep in mind something Gruber recalls from a product briefing with Jony Ive years ago:

Apple didn’t change things just for the sake of changing them. That Apple was insistent on only changing things if the change made things better. And that this was difficult, at times, because the urge to do something that looks new and different is strong, especially in tech.

Apple’s hardware team still operates this way. An M5 MacBook Pro looks like an M1 MacBook Pro. An Apple Watch Series 11 is hard to distinguish from a Series 0. These designs don’t change because they’re excellent.

The software team lost that discipline somewhere. Gruber again:

I know a lot of talented UI designers and a lot of insightful UI critics. All of them agree that MacOS’s UI has gotten drastically worse over the last 10 years, in ways that seem so obviously worse that it boggles the mind how it happened.

The icons are just the most visible symptom. The confidence to not change something—to trust that the current design is still the best design—requires knowing the difference between familiarity and complacency. Somewhere along the way, Apple’s software designers stopped being able to tell.

Every designer has noticed that specific seafoam green in photos of mid-century control rooms. It shows up in nuclear plants, NASA mission control, old hospitals. Wasn’t the hospital in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that color? It’s too consistent to be coincidence.

Beth Mathews traced the origin back to color theorist Faber Birren, who consulted for DuPont and created the industrial color safety codes still in use today. His reasoning:

“The importance of color in factories is first to control brightness in the general field of view for an efficient seeing condition. Interiors can then be conditioned for emotional pleasure and interest, using warm, cool, or luminous hues as working conditions suggest. Color should be functional and not merely decorative.”

Color should be functional and not merely decorative. These weren’t aesthetic choices—they were human factors engineering decisions, made in environments where one mistake could be catastrophic. The seafoam green was specifically chosen to reduce visual fatigue. Kinda cool.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department font switch is a political signal dressed up as design rationale. At least that’s what Chenyang “Platy” Hsu argues. In her deep dive into the decision and with a detour into the history of certain fonts, Hsu says Times New Roman is a newspaper workhorse made for economy, not ceremony. And many U.S. institutions favor stronger serif families or purpose-built sans-serifs.

Hsu:

…the design and historical reasons cited in Rubio’s memo don’t hold up. The formality and authority of serif typefaces are largely socially constructed, and Times New Roman’s origin story and design constraints don’t express these qualities. If Times New Roman carries authority at all, it’s primarily borrowed from the authority of institutions that have adhered to it. If the sincere goal were to “return to tradition” by returning to a serif, there are many choices with deeper pedigree and more fitting gravitas.

“Size of Life” is a fun comparison of the different sizes of living things by Neal Agarwal and illustrated by Julius Csotonyi. In case you don’t know the Agarwal, he’s created a dazzling collection of fun/funny minisites. Reminds me of “Powers of Ten” by Charles and Ray Eames.

Graphic designer Emily Sneddon performed some impressive typographic anthropology to digitize the font used on San Francisco’s MUNI light rail cars. She tracked down the original engineer who worked on the destination display signs for a company called Trans-Lite.

Sneddon, on her blog:

Learning that the alphabet came from an engineer really explains its temperament and why I was drawn to it in the first place. The signs were designed for sufficiency: fixed segments, fixed grid, and no extras. Characters were created only as destinations required them, while other characters, like the Q, X, and much of the punctuation, were never programmed into the signs. In reducing everything to its bare essentials, somehow character emerged, and it’s what inspired me to design Fran Sans.

If you were into computers like I was between 1975 and 1998, you read Byte magazine. It wasn’t just product reviews and spec sheets—Byte offered serious technical depth, covering everything from assembly language programming to hardware architecture to the philosophy of human-computer interaction. The magazine documented the PC revolution as it happened, becoming required reading for anyone building or thinking deeply about the future of computing. It was also thick as hell.

Someone made a visual archive of Byte magazine, showing each page of the printed pages in a zoomable interface:

Before Hackernews, before Twitter, before blogs, before the web had been spun, when the internet was just four universities in a trenchcoat, there was BYTE. A monthly mainline of the entire personal computing universe, delivered on dead trees for a generation of hackers. Running from September 1975 to July 1998, its 277 issues chronicled the Cambrian explosion of the microcomputer, from bare-metal kits to the dawn of the commercial internet. Forget repackaged corporate press releases—BYTE was for the builders.

It’s a fun glimpse into the past before thin laptops, smartphones, and disco-colored gaming PCs.

Designer and front-end dev Ondřej Konečný has a lovely presentation of his book collection.

My favorites that I’ve read include:

• Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (my review)
• Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Müller-Brockmann
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte

(h/t Jeffrey Zeldman)

Ryan Feigenbaum created a fun Teenage Engineering-inspired color palette generator he calls “ColorPalette Pro.” Back in 2023, he was experimenting with programatic palette generation. But he didn’t like his work, calling the resulting palettes “gross, with luminosity all over the place, clashing colors, and garish combinations.”

So Feigenbaum went back to the drawing board:

That set off a deep dive into color theory, reading various articles and books like Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color (1963), understanding color space better, all of which coincided with an explosion of new color methods and technical support on the web.

These frustrations and browser improvements culminated in a realization and an app.

Here he is, demoing his app:

I wouldn’t call myself a gamer, but I do enjoy good games from time to time, when I have the time. A couple of years ago, I made my way through Hades and had a blast.

But I do know that the publishing of a triple-A title like Call of Duty: Black Ops takes an enormous effort, tons of human-hours, and loads of cash. It’s also obvious to me that AI has been entering into entertainment workflows, just like it has in design workflows.

Ian Dean, writing for Creative Bloq explores this controversy with Activision using generative AI to create artwork for the latest release in the Call of Duty franchise. Players called the company out for being opaque about using AI tools, but more importantly, because they spotted telltale artifacts.

Many of the game’s calling cards display the kind of visual tics that seasoned artists can spot at a glance: fingers that don’t quite add up, characters whose faces drift slightly off-model, and backgrounds that feel too synthetic to belong to a studio known for its polish.

These aren’t high-profile cinematic assets, but they’re the small slices of style and personality players earn through gameplay. And that’s precisely why the discovery has landed so hard; it feels a little sneaky, a bit underhanded.

“Sneaky” and “underhanded” are odd adjectives, no? I suppose gamers are feeling like they’ve been lied to because Activition used AI?

Dean again:

While no major studio will admit it publicly, Black Ops 7 is now a case study in how not to introduce AI into a beloved franchise. Artists across the industry are already discussing how easily ‘supportive tools’ can cross the line into fully generated content, and how difficult it becomes to convince players that craft still matters when the results look rushed or uncanny.

My, possibly controversial, view is that the technology itself isn’t the villain here; poor implementation is, a lack of transparency is, and fundamentally, a lack of creative use is.

I think the last phrase is the key. It’s the loss of quality and lack of creative use.

I’ve been playing around more with AI-generated images and video, ever since Figma acquired Weavy. I’ve been testing out Weavy and have done a lot of experimenting with ComfyUI in recent weeks. The quality of output from these tools is getting better every month.

With more and more AI being embedded into our art and design tools, the purity that some fans want is going to be hard to sustain. I think the train has left the station.

Someone on X recently claimed they “popularized” dithering in modern design—a bold claim for a technique that’s been around since Robert Floyd and Louis Steinberg formalized it in 1976 and Bill Atkinson refined it for the original Macintosh. The design community swiftly reminded them that revival isn’t invention, and that dithering’s current moment owes more to retro-tech aesthetics meeting modern GPU pipelines than to any single designer’s genius.

Speaking of which, here’s a visual explainer by Damar Aji Pramudita that’s worth your time on how dithering actually works. Apparently it’s only part one of three.

When I went to design school %#*! years ago, Philip Meggs’ History of Graphic Design was required reading, well, for our graphic design history classes. I remember that nearly all the examples in the book were European men. So I’m glad there’s a new edition coming out that broadens the history to include more.

Cheryl D. Holmes-Miller writing in PRINT Magazine about the forthcoming 7th Edition of Meggs’ History of Graphic Design:

The 7th Edition is a reformation — dismantling the core barriers that have kept many of us from realizing our full potential in this field. It will make a transformative difference for years to come. The next generation of designers will find themselves in the history of graphic design and propel the industry forward.

Holmes-Miller asked the book’s co-editor, Sandra Maxa about the “restructuring of the historical timeline and how this shift might affect educators whose weekly lectures have long relied on the linear storytelling approach.” To which Maxa said:

“To create a new edition that is relevant to students today, we used a more direct writing style and stronger representation of designers from different backgrounds,” she said. “We also advocated for restructuring the new edition around themes instead of chronology to avoid implying a hierarchy that comes with presenting something as ‘the first.’” Maxa continued, “Including diverse voices and practices of graphic design is integral to situating the work of graphic designers today with cultural and social contexts of the past and inviting broader participation and interpretation from readers to construct a shared history of graphic design.”

In a smart piece for Creative Bloq, Niklas Mortensen dissects the public backlashes against logo redesigns. As designers, we know it’s more than the logo. I mean, sometimes it is the logo and how terribly crafted it is, but most other times, it’s what the redoing of the brand identity represents.

People don’t love brands because they look good. They love them because they’re familiar, consistent, and emotionally resonant. The same way we return to a childhood game or a worn-in pair of trainers – if we see a brand we recognise, we will feel comfortable, content, even safe.

So when a brand ditches its serif, swaps its colours, or goes full minimalist (not design’s finest moment), it can feel like an act of erasure. And while sometimes that change is necessary, the emotional cost should never be underestimated, especially when the brand in question belongs to an organisation that’s been a part of people’s lives for generations.

Done carelessly, a rebrand can fracture the trust and equity a brand has spent decades building.

In the modern era, it was Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign that felt designed. The mark was perfect, the typography consistent—and made Gotham ubiquitous. All the materials just felt they were following brand guidelines—because they were.

In her piece for PRINT Magazine, Amelia Nash gathers five designers to talk about political design. This is a quote from Min Lew, partner at Base Design:

Political design turns ideals into imagery. The best work does more than convince. It invites people in, helping them feel part of something bigger. In a noisy, fragmented media landscape, design can cut through, speaking to emotion before intellect. 

Design doesn’t decide politics, but it shapes how politics is perceived, and perception often becomes reality. The real question is how the design can be done thoughtfully, with integrity, and with intention.

In graphic design news, a new version of the Affinity suite dropped last week, and it’s free. Canva purchased Serif, the company behind the Affinity products, last year. After about a year of engineering, they have combined all the products into a single product to offer maximum flexibility. And they made it free.

Of course then, that sparks debate.

Joe Foley, writing for Creative Bloq explains:

…A natural suspicion of big corporations is causing some to worry about what the new Affinity will become. What’s in it for Canva?

Theories abound. Some think the app will start to show adverts like many free mobile apps do. Others think it will be used to train AI (something Canva denies). Some wonder if Canva’s just doing it to spite Adobe. “Their objective was to undermine Adobe, not provide for paying customers. Revenge instead of progress,” one person thinks.

Others fear Affinity’s tools will be left to stagnate. “If you depend on a software for your design work it needs to be regularly updated and developed. Free software never has that pressure and priority to be kept top notch,” one person writes.

AI features are gated behind paid Canva premium subscription plans. This makes sense as AI features have inference costs. As Adobe is going all out with its AI features, gen AI is now table stakes for creative and design programs.

In a world where case studies dominate portfolios, explaining the problem and sharing the outcomes, a visuals-only gallery feels old fashioned. But Pentagram has earned the right to compile their own online monograph. It is one of the very few agencies in the world who could pull together an archive like this that features over 2,000 projects spanning their 53-year existence.

Try searches like: album covers, New York City, SNL, and Paula Scher.

*The folks at Pentagram aren’t complete heretics. They have a more traditional case studies section here.

Designer Davide Mascioli created a book and online archive of over 450 space exploration-related logos from around the world.

It’s a wonderful archive—pretty exhaustive—and includes a smattering of logos from science fiction (though less exhaustive there, since there are so many sci-fi properties).

Here are some of my favorites (graphically)…

I will admit that I’d not heard of this website until I came across this article. Playing around with Perfectly Imperfect myself, I find it to be the strange web Brutalist manifestation of MySpace for the Gen Z generation.

Sudi Jama, writing for It’s Nice That:

Talking about the design for Perfectly Imperfect’s social site pi.fyi, on the other hand, Tyler says: “The design calls back to an era where algorithms didn’t dominate your day-to-day experience on the internet.” Tyler rejects the homogenisation of web design and decided to swerve Perfectly Imperfect into a lane of its own, inspired by the early internet aesthetics of “solid but saturated colours, lack of texture, MS Paint-style airbrushing, and a singular broadcast-style aesthetic”, Brent David Freaney tells us. Brent’s studio Special Offer collaborated with Tyler to bring the best parts of early internet’s visuality, whilst still creating something that belongs in 2025. Some fun facts: Pi.fyi’s colour system was modelled from 1990s McDonald’s brand and style guidelines, and the spray paint logo was inspired by an old Teenage Fanclub band t-shirt Tyler got on eBay.

The platform thrives in the chaos, all born from its visible human touch. “A lot of the core pages that users spend time on (the home page, profiles, etc) are designed to look more like a magazine than a social site.” The visuals are deliberately flat, featuring few animations, in order to let the design cut through. The mixture of a home page presented as acting front page, with editorial content, user posts, profiles adorned in large image paired with bold bordered text, and written content pouring from the right side of the screen. Tyler says: “It’s this approach that’s led us to calling Perfectly Imperfect a ‘social magazine’.” Tyler is inspired by the likes of Index Mag, MySpace, and i-D, among others – all boundary-pushing platforms which hold a cultural authority.

For as long as I can remember, I’d always loved magazines. Print magazines aren’t as trendy these days, but back in the day, I probably had at least a dozen magazine subscriptions. My favorites—naturally—were always the ones with great editorial design, art direction, and photography. Classics like Wired, Interview, Harper’s Bazaar, and Rolling Stone. And, of course, Colors.

The New York Times Magazine lists the top 25 magazine covers of all time. Their list includes classics like George Lois’s cover for Esquire posing Muhammad Ali as Saint Sebastian, the black on black post-9/11 cover for The New Yorker by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and Annie Leibovitz’s photo of a clothed Yoko Ono and nude John Lennon for Rolling Stone.

It’s always interesting to hear how others think about the design process from the outside. Eli Woolery and Aaron Walter interview creativity researcher and author Keith Sawyer to learn about what he’s found to be true after interviewing hundreds of art and design professors and students over a decade for his new book:

The creativity doesn’t come at the beginning. You don’t start by having a brilliant insight. You just dive into the process. And then as you’re engaging in the process, the ideas emerge.

Sawyer emphasizes that art and design schools are not just teaching students how to create, but how to “see.” He found that many professors believe students already possess creativity, but the role of art and design school is to help them realize and develop that potential by teaching them to observe, critique, and reflect more deeply on their own work.

When I interviewed these artists and designers, I would say, how are you teaching students how to create? And everyone was quite uncomfortable with that question. A lot of them would say, we’re not teaching students how to create. Or they’ll say something like, the students are already creative. We’re teaching them how to realize the potential they have as creatives.

Sawyer notes that the hardest thing for students to learn is how to see their own work—that is, to understand what they have actually made rather than sticking rigidly to their original idea.

When we talk about learning to see, you’re talking about learning to see yourself. The hardest thing to teach a student is how to see their own work, to see something that they’ve just generated. Because these studio classes, students have opportunities to share their work in interim stages along the way. You don’t go off and work for two weeks or four weeks and then bring back in the finished product. You bring in your interim and you get a lot of feedback and comments on it.

And what the professors tell me is these 18, 19, and 20-year-olds, they don’t realize what they put on the canvas. Or if they’re a graphic designer, they don’t realize what it is that they’ve generated. A lot of times, they’ll think they’ve done a certain thing. So they have this kind of linear approach—model of the creative process where I’m going to have an idea and I’m going to execute it so they’ll start with their idea and they’ll execute it. They’ll think that what they put on the canvas is their original idea, but in a lot of cases, it’s not. They can’t see what they’ve done themselves, so that’s kind of powerful how do you teach someone that what you put on the canvas isn’t what you say you’re doing.

You can’t just tell them, “Hey, you’re wrong. Let me tell you what you’ve done.” You have to lead someone through that. You have to walk them through it.

One way you do it is you put students in the classroom together and then have them comment on other students’ work so they will be on the other side. And they’ll see another student. talking about what they’ve done and not really describing what’s really on the canvas.

So I think that’s the hardest thing about learning to see is learning to see yourself, learning to see your own work.

I think that’s the power of art and design school, this studio learning environment. I’m biased, of course, because that’s how I learned. Those who are self-taught or have gone through bootcamps miss out on a lot of this experience. The other thing the design school environment teaches is how to give and take critiques. It’s about the work, not you.

Ah, this brings back memories! I spent so much time in MacPaint working with these patterns when I was young. Paul Smith faithfully recreates them:

I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I’m talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the original Control Panel for setting the desktop background and in MacPaint as fill patterns.

I figured there’d must be clean, pixel-perfect GIFs or PNGs of them somewhere on the web. And perhaps there are, but after poking around a bit, I ran out of energy for that, but by then had a head of steam for extracting the patterns en masse from the original source, somehow. Then I could produce whatever format I needed for them.