🔺 The pyramid

The colored squares on the homepage are a week of colors, nested like a step pyramid seen from above. The small square in the center is today's color. Each ring further out is one day further back — a rolling week of 8.

Hover or tap any step to read that color's story in the plaque below. If a color has a verified source for its history, a Source link appears under the story — click through to see where the claim comes from.

🃏 History & Tarot

Every plaque has two tabs: History, the pigment's real backstory, and Tarot, which hue-matches that color to its nearest card in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's color-scale system — the same real tradition tarot decks are built on, not an invented mapping.

Toggle between the Rider-Waite and Thoth decks to see how the card's meaning shifts — most cards match across both, but a couple swap colors entirely between decks.

⟲ Reshuffle & chaos

Don't like the current spread? Two buttons give you a fresh arrangement:

• Reshuffle the week — same 8 colors, reordered through the rings, so you can see how relationship and placement change how each color reads
• Chaos around today — keeps today's color fixed at center, scrambles the rest

Pick how it animates: SpinClassic, at Single DipDouble DipDeep Vat speed.

🎨 Build your own combination

Head to Build your own combination to hand-pick colors from the full 797-color library (or type any hex code) and arrange your own set. Name it and save it straight to the public gallery for anyone to browse.

Each row gives you three ways in: type a hex code directly, pick a named color from the library dropdown, or tap the little color square — it opens your browser's native color picker, a full color wheel/gradient menu where you can drag to any shade, not just ones in the library.

Once you've got a combination you like:

• Reshuffle order re-arranges the colors you've already picked
• Shuffle all colors replaces every pick with a fresh random one — kept separate from Reshuffle, further down the page, so it's harder to hit by accident
• Undo shuffle appears after either one, in case you want your exact picks back
• Copy shareable link turns your exact combination into a URL — send it to anyone and they'll see the same set, no account needed

🔶 The Zeitgeist archive

Curated, themed color sets pulled from real images — never eyeballed, always pixel-sampled. Filter by category and click into any set to see its story, source links, and its own reshuffle/animation controls. Three kinds of sets live here:

• Zeits — real released works: album covers, film stills, seasonal images. Each has a verified title, category, and real release date, plus 8 colors with historically-researched, source-linked notes tied to that color's actual role in the image. Album ArtFilmSeasonal
• Bonnet — any photo, no historical research needed. Just 8 pixel-sampled colors with short descriptive notes. Two arrangements are generated per image.
• Sun Bonnet — same as Bonnet, but for sunrise/sunset photos. The sun itself is isolated and sampled separately — core and edge glow, 2 dedicated colors — instead of blending into the rest of the palette. The other 6 colors come from the rest of the scene.

🔬 The mechanics, for the curious

Every Zeitgeist color comes from real pixel data, not a guess. The image is resized down for speed, then run through k-means clustering (8 clusters) on raw pixel RGB values — each cluster's size becomes that color's dominance, how much of the image is actually that color.

Sun Bonnets find the sun's brightest point first (peak brightness × saturation), sample it for 2 colors — core and rim — then mask it out before clustering the remaining 6 from the rest of the scene. Eye close-ups get cropped and masked to an oval over just the sclera, iris, and pupil, so skin tone never enters the sample.

Ring order — center outward — depends on the set type and arrangement: Zeits and Bonnet's Arrangement A go by dominance, most pixel-coverage first; Bonnet's Arrangement B goes by lightness, lightest first. Sun Bonnet reverses both, so the sun's core and edge glow land at center and the rest ring outward from dark to light.

📋 Copy any color

Click a hex or RGB chip under any color's story to copy it straight to your clipboard — handy for design work, mood boards, whatever you're building.

🖼️ Save a set as an image

Signed-in members can save any color set — daily or Zeitgeist — as a crisp, print-ready PNG (300dpi, watermarked) for moodboards, prints, or sharing. Members get 2 saves every 24 hours.

💬 Join the conversation

Every color has a comment thread — members can react, add context, or debate whether that teal is really "teal." See something that shouldn't be there? Each comment has a flag icon to report it — our team reviews every report.