Inspiration from Fangor's soft rings and Stańczak's vibrating stripes to the geometry of Żarnower and Kobro, the wooden reliefs of Gołkowska and the forms Jarema drew from music.
macOS 14 or later · works offline · no account
Every picture below was just drawn in your browser by gen.js. Open the generator to change the palette, seed, size and the position of the circle.
Mac app
Study of Space is now a native app. Pick a motif, press space, and set the picture as your desktop. It runs the same generator as this site, offline.
Preview the picture on a phone and save it at the exact screen size.
Every seed is a different picture, from wrist to wall.
Fangor, Jarema, Kobro and more. Click a motif under try and the picture changes.
Soft rings, waves, stripes, steps and spatial planes, from Fangor to Kobro.
Size, position, wave height, rotation, paper grain and more. Auto follows the seed.
See the picture on a Mac, iPhone or Apple Watch, and step through every variant you made.
Renders at your screen's exact size, on one display or all of them. Or save a PNG in any size.
Randomize everything or just the colors, lock what you like, and flip through the history with the arrow keys.
The generator runs inside the app. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Inspirations
Geometric abstraction and op art grew in many places, and this project follows one thread of it through Poland. The thread runs through painting, sculpture, textiles and posters: from the constructivists of the 1920s, through Wojciech Fangor's soft rings and Julian Stańczak's vibrating stripes, to the reliefs and woven forms of the 1960s.
Women were part of it from the start. Teresa Żarnower founded Blok, the first Polish constructivist group, in the 1920s, and Katarzyna Kobro built spatial compositions from flat planes. Maria Jarema, a founder of the Kraków Group in the 1930s, drew abstract forms out of music and dance. Later Wanda Gołkowska built reliefs from wooden blocks and Magdalena Abakanowicz hung woven forms from the ceiling.
Posters ran alongside the paintings. After the Second World War Polish graphic designers were given a great deal of artistic freedom, and Jan Lenica later named the result the Polish School of Posters in an article for the Swiss magazine Graphis. It is known for economy of form, wit, hand-made lettering and color used for feeling rather than description. It is usually told as a list of men, but Wanda Telakowska is credited with shaping the contemporary form of a Polish national style in design, and Maria Ihnatowicz, Anna Huskowska and Olga Binder-Siemaszko made posters of their own, though their names appear far less often.
This project borrows techniques, not compositions: soft edges, rhythm, repetition, flat ink. The name comes from Study of Space, the 1958 installation by Wojciech Fangor and Stanisław Zamecznik, the first spatial installation in Poland.
One theme, two or three elements, a single metaphor. Jan Lenica wrote that for Zamecznik a poster was a mathematical operation: reduce complex formulas to the simplest equation, the sum of two or three elements.
In practice that meant no decoration that did not carry the idea. Józef Mroszczak is remembered for conveying maximum information with minimum means, Katarzyna Kobro built spatial sculptures from a few flat planes in strict architectural order, and the Cyrk circus posters kept to one theme and a metaphor the viewer had to read for themselves.
in the generator: stripes and disc, oscillogram, steps, spatial planesSaturated pairs and one hot accent, not realistic color. A restrained black and white page with a single blue or red does more than a rainbow.
Color in these posters was used emotionally rather than descriptively, from muted tones to stark contrasts. Zamecznik sometimes reduced a poster to lettering on black, the jazz posters set silhouettes against yellow, blue, red and white, and Zofia Stryjeńska had earlier turned folk color into a flat, saturated Slavic art deco. Every palette here has a ground, a dark ink, a light ink and one accent, so a picture can stay quiet until the accent speaks.
in the generator: one accent per palette, 83 presets, including a Stryjeńska paletteWhen neighbouring hues are close in brightness, or an edge has no clear line, the eye keeps refocusing and the shape seems to pulse or float. Fangor built whole paintings on this, and Stańczak did it with narrow stripes.
Donald Judd described Stańczak's 1964 show as fields of narrow, vibrating stripes. Fangor's squares pulse because every ring is a gradient with no hard line. The generator builds the same blur from stacked translucent layers instead of filters, so the edges stay smooth at any size.
in the generator: squares, rings, dream, wavy stripesMultiply, rotate, double: simple forms repeated until they read as music or machinery. Posters for the Warsaw Autumn festival drew sound itself as zigzags and spreading waves.
Zamecznik multiplied, rotated and doubled a form, Świerzy drew rhythmic waves of color for the same festival, Maria Jarema took her rhythm from music and dance, and Wanda Gołkowska built wooden reliefs on rhythm and texture. Here repetition is a parameter: how many copies, what tilt, how tight the spacing, so one form can read as a flower, a fan or an engine.
in the generator: oscillogram, rhythm bars, multiply and rotate, unism, wooden relief, organic rhythmAirbrush fades, slightly off-register inks, torn or cut paper. The small imperfection keeps flat geometry warm.
Hand-printed posters were rarely perfectly aligned, Lenica built his from cut paper, Młodożeniec held bright stains in thick black lines that sat a little off their color, and Magdalena Abakanowicz wove her Abakans into soft forms that hang like fabric. The generator fakes none of it with filters: off-register print, paper grain and ragged cut-outs are all seeded geometry, so a seed still reproduces the exact picture.
in the generator: off-register print, paper grain, cut-outs, outlined stains, woven stripsTimeline
Scroll the timeline: the poster follows.
The full notes, with sources and the status of every motif, are on the research page.
The Mac app needs macOS 14, the command line and the skill need Node. All of them use the same generator.
A native app for macOS 14 or later. Pick a motif and set it as your wallpaper. Works offline, no account.
Mac app available soonPrints the recipe to stderr, so any result can be reproduced.
node poster-bg/scripts/gen.js --dream --out waves.svg node poster-bg/scripts/gen.js --ring --colors random \ --circle 1.2 --x 0.4 --y 0.6 --out ring.svg
Copy the folder once, then ask in plain words or use flags.
cp -R poster-bg ~/.claude/skills/
# in Claude Code
/poster-bg --dream
Dark UI with history, editable colors, mosaic granularity, SVG and PNG export.
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