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What Have We Here?

Mood & Figure is a collection of photographs, paintings, drawings, illustrations, typefaces, packaging designs, posters, identity work, book covers, album covers, animals, people, places, and faces—anything I find that inspires me and makes me want to share it with the world! While I am a bit of a designer myself, all of the works showcased here are not my own. Mood & Figure serves as more of an inspiration stream; my own work can be seen in my portfolio.

Citations

To me, it’s important to credit the original artists. I try not to post things if I can’t find the artist’s site or a source that at least credits them (although if they’ve been dead for centuries I usually just link to Wikipedia). If you like someone’s work enough to crave more of it, you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops and conduct your own research to find more. I realize this makes it harder to find other content aggregators that cater to your interests, but it seems like so many people just link to stray posts on tumblr that I feel this is worth it.

Search

You can search by tags to find things that interest you. Each tag is a single term, with spaces as underscores. Spaces between tags will narrow down your results to only posts with both tags, and any tag with a – prefixed to it will be excluded from the search results. I’ll help you build your search queries by displaying the tags in search results like so (in this case you’ve searched for “photograph” and are looking at a post that’s also tagged “switzerland”):

Just use the + and – buttons to include or exclude tags in your results, and click the word itself to search for just that term. Tags are chosen by myself and might not always be as accurate or obvious as you’d like them to be. Nothing’s perfect, but hopefully the tags page will give you a good idea of the kinds of things you can search for.

Thanking

Every post has a little “thumbs up” icon next to it, which you probably assumed is a like button. In essence, it is, but around these parts we call it a “thanks button.” By clicking it, instead of saying “I like this,” you’re really saying “thanks for creating something so amazing” to the original artist (not to me, I’m just here to show you the works of these great people!). You can pretend it’s a like button if you think this this distinction is silly, but I believe it says a lot more to give thanks than to merely say you like something.

Color

I love color. I think it’s fascinating, and the possibilities of working with it programmatically are absolutely exciting!

Every image that’s posted here is run through a color parser I wrote myself, which scales the image down into a tiny square and analyzes the color of each pixel. Then, the most common colors are tested for contrast against the off-white background of this site and stored in the post. Right now it only goes for actual colors, not shades of grey, so if an image is black and white or uses really light colors, it’ll fall back on Mood & Figure’s default red color. I’m thinking I’ll allow shades of grey at some point in the future, but that won’t be anytime soon. You can see the chosen color for a post by hovering over that post’s buttons or selecting its text.

Mood & Figure also has a color archive which displays tons of single-color squares which represent each post on the site. It’s not very useful for finding posts, but it’s interesting to look at!