Sunday Fun: Re-creating a Radiohead cover
Mads Stoumann
Posted on June 2, 2024
The other day, I read an article about how Radiohead's graphic designer, Stanley Donwood, got inspired by words from billboards — and the combination of the colors red, green, blue, yellow, orange, black and white — for the cover to "Hail to the Thief" by Radiohead.
The cover has much more graphic elements than this, but let's try to mimic the random color-combinations and the texts in CSS and JavaScript.
First, I asked chatGPT to generate an array of a 100 words, inspired by the cover:
const words = ["Fear", "Control", "Truth", "Lies" ...]
Next, I grabbed the primary colors:
const colors = ['#D0001D', '#0D5436', '#093588', '#FDA223', '#F8551A', '#101624', '#EAEFF0'];
A small method returns a random background-color, and makes sure that the text-color is not the same:
function getRandomColorPair() {
const bgIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * colors.length);
let cIndex;
do {
cIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * colors.length);
} while (cIndex === bgIndex);
return { bg: colors[bgIndex], c: colors[cIndex] };
}
And finally, the words and colors are added to <li>
-tags:
const canvas = document.querySelector('ul');
canvas.innerHTML = words.map(word => {
const { bg, c } = getRandomColorPair();
return `<li style="--bg: ${bg};--c: ${c};">${word}</li>`;
}).join('');
Styling
I browsed handwriting fonts on Google Fonts, and found a great match: Pangolin.
Next, a few styles for the <li>
-elements:
li {
background-color: var(--bg);
color: var(--c);
font-family: "Pangolin", system-ui, sans-serif;
font-size: 5cqi;
letter-spacing: -0.075em;
padding-inline: 1ch;
text-transform: uppercase;
}
And ... almost done. Just need a few styles on the <ul>
-element:
ul {
all: unset;
container-type: inline-size;
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
justify-content: center;
list-style: none;
}
And we get:
That looks a little bit boring, doesn't it?
Let's add a squiggly SVG-filter:
ul {
filter: url('#squiggly-0');
}
Note: See the SVG-code for the filter in the CodePen below.
And now we get:
Much better!
Here's the CodePen demo – re-fresh to get new, random color-combinations:
Posted on June 2, 2024
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