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Look, Everything Is…Code
Code is my default medium, not just for programs. It makes visual production cheaper, repeatable, and easier to change, but taste remains human.
The method: 24 files in, five images out
My last article went out with five images. I wrote 24 HTML files, rendered them through headless Chrome, and kept five. The cover alone took nine variants before one survived.
Twenty-four files for five survivors is the method, not the embarrassment. Nothing here was one-shot by a model and shipped: nineteen of those renders I rejected by hand, one at a time. Each render is a single command, so all twenty-four still fit into one afternoon. The expensive part was judgment, not rendering.
Then code got cheap. That part is well-documented; work that used to justify a contractor now takes an afternoon. Here is the part I claim as mine: when code gets cheap enough, it stops staying inside software. It invades things that were never code. What I generate now instead of drawing:
- the logo and the favicon set
- article covers and diagrams
- social cards for 20,000+ pages
- my LinkedIn banner
- screenshots for docs
