// the find
mattdesl/color-wander
:art: Generative artwork in node/browser based on a seeded random
A single-purpose generative art sketch by mattdesl: a seeded random walk over a palette/luma map rendered to canvas, runnable both in the browser and via node-canvas for high-res stills. It's for people who want to look at or tinker with one well-executed procedural art algorithm, not for anyone wanting a reusable generative-art library.
Same renderer code runs in browser and Node via node-canvas, so you can explore seeds live then render a 2560x1440 PNG of the one you like with a single `node print [seed]` call. Seeded random means any output is fully reproducible from a single integer, which is the right design for this kind of exploratory tool. The luma-sampling approach (walking based on brightness of a reference image in maps/) is a genuinely interesting technique worth reading even if you never run the code.
Dead project: last push in 2022 and the actual algorithm dates to a 2016-era blog post, with Babel/npm tooling that's aged out — expect friction getting node-canvas to build on a current Node version. Licensing is a trap: code is MIT but the generated artwork itself is CC BY-NC-ND, so you can read the source but can't sell what it produces without rewriting it meaningfully. No tests, no API docs beyond a dead blog link, and the code isn't structured as a library (no exports you'd import into another project) — you're meant to clone and hack on it directly, not depend on it.