Mondrian

Recursive subdivision, split at U(0.3, 0.7).

images.mondrian · v1 · renderer canvas

41 cells · 15 painted · cuts in U(0.30, 0.70) · 9 px lines

Every rectangle larger than 3.5% of the canvas is cut in two, at a fraction drawn from U(0.30, 0.70) of whichever side the squareness control selected. Nothing draws the black lines: they are the ground, showing through a 9 px gutter left around every cell.

[data-canvas-stage] { display: none; }

Drawn in the browser

This generator does not send you an image. The server sends a short description of one — the parameters below, plus a 32-byte key — and the drawing is done here, from the same byte stream the server would have used. That needs JavaScript, so with it switched off there is nothing to show.

The description itself is still public: /api/v1/g/images.mondrian returns it, and the maths is in resources/js.

41 cells · 15 painted · cuts in U(0.30, 0.70) · 9 px lines

Controls · from schema()

Width

256 2048

Height

256 2048

Cut range, low

0.02 0.5

Where along a rectangle a cut may fall. Push this to 0.02 and the composition shreds into slivers; push it to 0.5 and every cut lands in the middle, which is a grid.

Stop below

0.002 0.25

A rectangle smaller than this fraction of the canvas is left whole. The single strongest control over how busy the result is.

Cut the long side

0 1

How often a cut crosses the longer side. At 1 every rectangle is pushed towards square; at 0 the composition drifts into long bands.

Painted cells

0 1

The fraction that get a colour rather than staying paper. Mondrian used very few, and a canvas that is mostly colour stops reading as a composition and starts reading as a quilt.

Line weight

0 30

The gutter between cells, in pixels. The lines are not drawn — they are the ground showing through.

Lines

Unpainted cells are white

Off, the unpainted cells take the palette's lightest stop instead, which keeps the whole composition inside one colour scheme.

Colour

Palette size

2 10

Grain

0 0.08

Entropy source

Picking a source changes the story on the receipt, never the quality: anything below class A is mixed with the OS CSPRNG before it reaches you. This result actually came from NIST Randomness Beacon.

seed token DFNG1M2085B7TS0Z06EQ09VBDW

Re-render keeps this token. Generate replaces it. That is the whole idea.

Burned into the corner before the file is written, so the image keeps its provenance wherever it ends up:

entropy in

16 bytes

stream used

989 bytes

rejections

duration

381 µs

palette

background

#010103

cells

painted

cut range

U(0.30, 0.70)

Seed receipt

Class B · Public beacon cached

NIST Beacon pulse #1,941,315 — chained to every pulse before it, and signed.

Published openly — anyone can look this value up after the fact.

source: NIST Randomness Beacon
observed: 2026-09-14T17:21:00+00:00
latency: 0ms
mixed with: csprng — always

https://beacon.nist.gov/beacon/2.0/chain/2/pulse/1941315 ↗

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The token is the seed, so this link recomputes the result rather than looking it up. No database, and it works for as long as v1 does.

This page and /api/v1/g/images.mondrian run the same code. There is no private endpoint.

Mondrian

Result

Measurements

Seed receipt

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