This Pelican blog has sat still since about 2014. I used to publish it to an S3 bucket with static hosting turned on. I've been thinking about establishing a new place to write lately, then remembered this was already here, and the domain kinda covers my professional interests still, so I went with it. But retconning it into contemporary versions of things wasn't a straightforward task. Not an overwhelmingly hard task, or very large, but it was a bunch of stuff that had to change a little all at once.

Then there's Claude.

I'm not going to go on about Claude itself a lot, there are plenty of people doing that already. But suffice it to say that while I'm not employed I have a lot of time on my hands and a lot of experience managing software teams. Tools this good - at least in terms of performance in building software systems, setting aside the much bigger questions at play - are really still brand-spanking new. They weren't this good more than three months ago. They just let me build pretty much whatever I feel like building, as if I had my own team that works really quickly and lets me operate in the plan/scope/refine/review mode I've been in professionally for a while now.

So while I have this time available and this ridiculous toolkit and before it all crumbles somehow or the prices go sky-high (both of which will probably happen sooner than we expect) and I have a bunch of ideas of stuff to build, I'm building stuff.

Fiddly tiny blog migration project? I know a thing that will help me get that done a lot faster than I could myself. It created this pull request to modernize the environment, and this pull request to retcon old posts into the new structure. It coached me on getting migrated to a new hosting platform and updating DNS. Darned thing just worked, dang it all.

I was testing the retconned content and noticed a warning about lacking a favicon. What to do? I asked for proposals. Thoughtfully it reached into my older content and came up with good ideas, so I asked it to draft the rest of this post for content.

I went with "four patch grid" because it looked best as a favicon, and there was something familiar about it, beyond just the color choices (see Albers color study posts from 2014). Took a few minutes to figure it out, but it's basically the same design as the old del.icio.us icon, just with the Albers study colors taken from those prior posts. Seemed like a good fit. I don't know if joshu is still out there, but I hope he's been good, and I hope he doesn't mind.

Everything below this sentence was bot-generated.

The Brief

The site needed a favicon. Given that so much of the early content here is built around Josef Albers' color studies rendered in D3, it made sense to draw from that same visual language: simple geometric shapes, deliberate color choices, and the interplay between them.

The constraint is severe. A favicon lives at 16x16 or 32x32 pixels. Whatever we choose has to read clearly at those sizes, in a browser tab alongside a dozen others, often against both light and dark chrome. That rules out anything with fine detail or subtle gradation. What survives is flat color and strong shape.

With that in mind, here were four candidates, each inspired by a different Albers study from the earlier posts.

Option 1: Nested Squares

Three concentric squares: deep purple, red-orange, yellow. This echoes the very first Albers exercise on the site — placing one color inside another to see how the surround changes your perception of the inner color. The nesting reads well at small sizes because the contrast between the three layers is high. At 16px the innermost square is only a few pixels across, but the warm-to-cool progression still registers.

Option 2: Offset Overlap

Two overlapping rectangles — teal and yellow — with a mint intersection zone. This one references the transparency and optical mixture studies, where Albers demonstrated that you can simulate the appearance of overlapping translucent layers using nothing but flat, opaque color. The intersection is the key: it's a third color that your eye reads as the blend of the other two, even though it's just a solid fill.

At 128px this tells the richest story of any of the options. At 16px the three-zone structure starts to muddy — the intersection becomes hard to distinguish from its neighbors, and the asymmetric layout loses its spatial logic. The idea is stronger than its execution at favicon scale.

Option 3: Four-Patch Grid

A 2x2 grid of colored squares: pink, red, green, grey. These are the four colors from the juxtaposition study in the second Albers post, where every permutation of layering was laid out in a grid to show how quantity and ordering affect the feel of a color combination.

This one holds up the best at small sizes. Four equal quadrants is about the simplest spatial structure you can have beyond a single block, and the four colors are different enough in both hue and value that they stay distinct even at 16px. The 2x2 grid also has a nice visual rhythm — it reads as a deliberate pattern, not a smudge.

Option 4: Stacked Bands

Four horizontal bands progressing from dark olive to bright yellow. This references the middle mixture and light intensity studies, where Albers explored how adjacent colors of similar value seem to merge while colors with strong value contrast maintain their boundaries.

The bands are clean and simple, but at 16px the four-step gradient compresses into something that reads more like a generic color swatch than a distinctive mark. The progression is too smooth — there's no focal point for the eye to grab.

The Choice

The four-patch grid won. It has the clearest identity at the sizes that matter, the colors are directly drawn from the Albers work on the site, and the 2x2 structure is simple enough to be iconic without being generic. It's the one you're seeing in your browser tab right now.