About

What it is

ThemeForseen is a small drawer you add to the site you are building. It lists color themes and font pairings; choose one and your own page changes in place. When something fits, copy the tokens or write them straight into your project. It is an npm package, open source under the MIT license, with 2,055 themes and 198 pairings in it at the moment.

Why a weather station

Foreseen reads two ways. This one is the forecast, not the fortune. A forecast does not judge the weather; it reports the conditions and lets you decide about the coat. ThemeForseen does not score your design. It shows you what a change looks like on the page you are actually making, and leaves the deciding to you.

The site is the instrument that idea needed: the TF-01 Visual Exploration Unit, an elaborate late-seventies machine whose entire purpose is trying colors and type on a web page. The joke is in the proportion. The machine can be enormous. The claim stays small.

The machine

The unit is this website, and the drawer on it is the real ThemeForseen. Open it, pick something, and the chassis, the keys and the lettering take the new conditions; the tube reports them. The hardware keeps its own colors, the way hardware does.

It is built from ordinary HTML, CSS and SVG, without a framework, so that a change of theme costs a few milliseconds. The map on the tube is Natural Earth's; the weather over it is the instrument's own idea, not a forecast of anything.

Who

Made by Mark McDermott in Austin, Texas, at mm.coffee. The source of the drawer is on GitHub, as is the source of this site.

Colophon

Astro and Tailwind. Geist, Inter, M PLUS 1 Code and EB Garamond, served from here. Natural Earth for the map, Simple Icons for the stack marks. Firmware theme-forseen 0.6.1.