Designers default to the same digital palettes. Pastiche pulls from 5,800 open-access museum works, capturing the real color relationships masters spent decades perfecting, and writes them directly into your Figma file as variable tokens.
Every interface pulls from the same 12 palettes on Pinterest. Color has stopped being a design decision.
Masters solved color balance we're still copying poorly. That knowledge is freely available in museum archives. No one had made it usable in a design tool.
Everything runs inside Figma's local iframe. The only external call is a zero-maintenance Cloudflare Worker that proxies museum images around browser CORS restrictions.
01 Painting Library
In-memory keyword search across the full NGA open-access catalog. Results as a grid of 24 thumbnails with name, artist, year, and medium.
02 Color Extraction
k-means isolates structurally distinct shades: dominant warmth, cool accents, and neutral anchors. Outputs a full 5-token palette plus brand, secondary, and neutral scales.
03 Export
Writes organized Variable Collections directly into the Figma file. Exports as JSON Design Tokens and native CSS custom properties.
Select any layer, pick a painting, click generate. Pastiche walks nested groups, fills, and borders. Writes tokens and repaints the canvas in seconds.
per month. Runs entirely on free tiers
painting to complete token generation
open-access artworks in the catalog
You don't need a bloated backend to ship a production-ready product. Keep heavy lifting local. Use serverless only where the browser can't.
The right architecture, not the most impressive one, is what lets a solo product ship fast and stay maintainable.
Art history is an underused design resource. The masters solved color problems we're still copying poorly from Pinterest.
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