Matthew Howell

is a person trying to make nice websites and—sometimes—other things.

AF- Public domain (CC0)
☝️ What is this?

The illustration above is a piece of responsive, algorithmic art. It was generated by human-handwritten code that runs when this page loads.

You, your web browser, and this website all helped make it. And then we all gave it away: it is licensed with CC0 and in the public domain. It belongs to you, me, and everyone.

You can download the .svg, or use the button below to make a new piece of art.

More about how it works

Each page load (or button press) reruns the code and regenerates the art.

For a while, because the number of permutations is quite large, each request should create a new, unique result. Eventually, the art will begin to repeat, and tiny communities of strangers will share these little bits of shape and color.

Under the hood it's using SVG.js hooked up to Cloudflare worker and sending the resulting <svg> element over the wire (thanks to the wonders of gzip compression).

Each piece of art generated by this little factory has a unique factory_id and key, tacking those two values onto the URL allows the art to be shared. The factory_id of the piece above is and its key is .

Hello, friend! My name is Matthew, and you have found my personal website. Websites are amazing. This one is some kind of attempt at a public memory.

Here, browsers will find some writing collected in /notes, some /photos, and a catch-all heap of other /work. There is also a /reading log, and a very, very (really very) occasional email newsletter called ▽ Pizza. Find more about me and this website by clicking this cool hyperlink to the About page. Find more links by carefully scrolling down the page. And, because feeds are nice, there are feeds.

For professional inquiries, find me at Reasonable Company, my values-led design and creative practice. Here, there, and everywhere, I'm trying to do good work for humans and screens.

Say hello over on Mastodon or, less enthusiastically, Bluesky, or even on the old-fashioned /about page.

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