Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website

Re:Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website by venkii on Thursday August 14, 2025 @12:16AM (#44896693)

Hey HN!

Check out this fun tool I built to make cover images for my blog. The main goal: interesting looking random gradients, that all draw from a single color palette.

I stumbled upon this post from Justin Jay Wang [1], who designed for OpenAI - describing methods for random gradients, including the one that shipped on OpenAI’s homepage from 2020-2022.

Since the post included ~10 SVGs, I was able to reverse engineer the SVG parameters, and decided to put up a generator. You can see the exact deets in my Github README [2].

I also use it to generate cover images for my Substack [3] - if you want to see what using a bunch of images generated by it looks like.

[1] https://justinjay.wang/methods-for-random-gradients/

[2] https://github.com/venkr/gradient-gen

[3] https://venkii.substack.com/

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Re:Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website by beeman on Thursday August 14, 2025 @01:24AM (#44896999)

Looks awesome! It would be good to add a license to your repo!

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Re:Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website by venkii on Thursday August 14, 2025 @11:14AM (#44901384)

Done - thanks :)

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Re:Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website by tomaspollak on Thursday August 14, 2025 @08:02AM (#44899398)

Great work! Maybe you can add an option to use the 'heightmap' method described by Justin in his blog post. And maybe let users add their own palettes? :)

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Re:Show HN: Generate random gradients like on OpenAI's website by venkii on Thursday August 14, 2025 @12:48PM (#44902689)

Thanks! I'll look into adding custom palettes & the heightmap method. Might not get to it tbh - but I'll take a look.

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