Gradients, ghosts, and glorious BASIC
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans equal parts color theory and cathode-ray nostalgia: a gradient-tool roundup worth bookmarking, a 45-year-old BASIC game reborn in the browser, and a QR code guide for people who'd rather their codes look good than merely function. Let's get into it.
Curated list of shader and gradient tools for creatives
If your gradients still top out at "CSS linear-gradient, two stops, called it a day," this thread is a good excuse to level up. It rounds up WebGL mesh-gradient generators, color-ramp and design-token systems, and a handful of animated shader-based gradient makers — the kind of toolkit that turns a flat background into something with actual depth and motion. Nothing here is groundbreaking on its own, but as a curated starting point for a design system or a generative-art palette, it's the sort of list worth saving before you need it (via X).
Donkey.bas is 45 years old – 131 lines of glory
DONKEY.BAS, the crude little car-dodging game Bill Gates and Neil Konzen bundled with early IBM PCs in 1981, has been faithfully rebuilt in JavaScript for its 45th birthday — CRT scanline effect, cheat mode, and all. It's a nice bit of size-coding history: 131 lines that once demonstrated what a brand-new PC could do, now preserved as a museum piece you can play in any tab (via HN discussion).
From motion to meaning: Denis Avramenko's approach to interactive design
A Codrops designer spotlight walking through how Avramenko builds motion and typography into client sites — less "here's a cool effect" and more "here's why the transition exists at all." Worth a read if you're trying to move past decoration and toward interaction that actually communicates something (via Codrops).
On process: Serpentine invites public to interact with its archive
London's Serpentine Gallery has opened "processing… Art and Advanced Technologies," a physical exhibition unpacking a decade of the institution's work at the intersection of art and tech, running through September 6. It's more archive-as-artifact than interactive demo, but for anyone tracking how galleries think about documenting digital-native work, it's a useful data point (via Right Click Save).
Guide to (not) fucking up QR codes
A practical, no-nonsense rundown of how to make a QR code look designed rather than default without tanking its scannability — error-correction margins, contrast rules, the usual suspects that get ignored the moment someone wants a logo in the middle. (unverified — page text unreachable) Still a handy checklist if you're about to hand one to a designer (via Lobsters discussion).
Quick hits
- Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out — a data-driven eulogy for the links that didn't make it.
- Spaghettifying DRAM — hardware hacking so deep it comes with its own gravitational pull.
- There are two kinds of theorems — a tidy, evergreen way to sort your math.
- LinkedIn CringeBot 3000 — satire that hits a little too close to your feed.
- Understanding is the new bottleneck — the AI-era essay everyone's quietly nodding along to.
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