about

Patterns drawn from the sea

Shapes of Blue is a collection of minimal, generative patterns. Each one begins with something the sea does: swell rolling in from the shore, eelgrass leaning with the current, flakes of marine snow sinking through the deep. Each is drawn in a single colour with lines only, so it works as well on a pen plotter or a screen-printed poster as it does on a screen.

Every pattern is a small program and a seed. The sliders change how the program draws; the sea is the seed, and the same sea with the same settings always gives the same picture. That is why a pattern can be shared as an address rather than a file, and why the SVG you download is exactly what you saw.

the families

The sea is divided into families, and the front page filters by them. Surface is the sea seen from outside. Current is water on the move. Kelp is what grows from the bottom and sways. Seabed is what you stand on. Deep is what you see when the light goes. Shells is the sea's own geometry. Shoals is the living, in numbers. And Shore, still open, is where land and water meet.

surface and deep

The site has two lights. Surface is the Nordic sea in daylight: foam, wet sand, dark water as ink. Deep is the clear sea at depth, lit by bioluminescence. The patterns themselves stay monochrome in both; only the room around them changes.

how it is made

The site is a handful of plain files with no framework and no tracking. The typography is Instrument Serif for the names of the sea, Geist for reading and Geist Mono for numbers and labels, all from Google Fonts under open licences. The structure of a pattern page, a preview beside its sliders with a download at hand, owes a debt to Book of Shapes by Nikolaj Sokolowski, whose site showed how good a collection like this can be. Every pattern, recipe and line of code here is original.

who

Made by Hans Henrik Heming, who spends a lot of time in the sea. Questions, ideas and requests for a pattern that does not exist yet are welcome.