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Placas

The plate generator for Víctimas de la Cultura: a seeded drawing tool that makes the two-colour plates the magazine uses where a piece has no picture.

Why

Many pieces reach the magazine without an image, and each still needs a cover, a card and a share card. Every piece without a cover gets a plate drawn from its own key, so the same piece always gets the same plate. Each section has its own kind of mark and ground: dots for photography, rules for fiction, rings for poetry, hatching for essays, film strips for documentary.

A plate of halftone dots in dark ink on a cyan ground, thinning toward one edge.
A plate of concentric rings of dots on an orange ground, with a cyan accent.
A plate of diagonal hatching in ink on paper.
A plate of film strips and a mirrored waveform on paper, with an orange dot.
A plate of contour lines on paper.
A plate of horizontal rules interrupted by bands from a second seed.
Six plates exported by the tool: photography, poetry, essay, documentary, a kind with no section, and rules crossed with a second seed.

Masks, not drawings

On the site a plate is one SVG path used as a CSS mask in two layers, ink and accent. The colour comes from the page, so it follows the theme without a second file. Drawn inline, the home page weighed 816 KB; as masks, 145 KB.

From a site feature to a tool

The generator grew past what the site needs: a second seed with four ways to mix it in, and six kinds with no section. I made it a tool of its own and the single source of the generator, so the tool and the site cannot draw a plate differently. Every option starts from the seed. A badge says whether the site can still reproduce a plate or it is for export only.

The Placas panel mid-edit: a plate of rules crossed with a second seed, changed rows marked in orange, the badge reading Solo exportación.The Placas panel mid-edit: a plate of rules crossed with a second seed, changed rows marked in orange, the badge reading Solo exportación.
The panel mid-edit: a plate crossed with a second seed, the changed rows marked, the badge on “Solo exportación”.
The sheet view: one seed drawn in all thirteen kinds of plate.The sheet view: one seed drawn in all thirteen kinds of plate.
The sheet: one seed in all thirteen kinds.

Moving plates

The preview animates in three ways, drift, sweep and flipbook, and every loop closes on itself. Video is drawn frame by frame from the parameters and handed to WebCodecs, not recorded off the screen, so no frame is dropped.

Exports: SVG with its parameters inside, layered SVG in the site’s format, PNG up to 8000 px a side, contact sheets, batches of up to 200 seeds, MP4, WebM and GIF.

A drift loop exported by the tool: six seconds, dots on cyan.
The animation group open, drift playing on a plate of dots on cyan, the transport under the canvas, the badge reading Compatible con el sitio.The animation group open, drift playing on a plate of dots on cyan, the transport under the canvas, the badge reading Compatible con el sitio.
The animation group, drift playing.

Where it stands

Built by Operator agent lanes working to my decisions. It runs locally as an internal tool for one magazine. The magazine has not launched, so no reader has seen a plate yet.