Rain Alley Painted

Painted plates are the middle ground and the most forgiving. Colour is already exaggerated, so pushing the palette to a saturated accent does not look like a filter, and the tonal range is deliberately wide, which gives the wordmark a bright band to sit against and a dark corner to shadow into.

They compress better than photoreal for animated formats. Broad areas of related colour are exactly what a 160-colour GIF palette handles well, so a painted scene at 7MB looks closer to its source than a photographic one at the same budget.

Choose painted when the server has no strong tonal identity yet. It is the style least likely to be wrong in a year.

See every painted design.

Narrow and vertical, which is the hardest shape to crop to a 17:1 strip, so this family composes its wide formats around the reflected light on the ground rather than the alley itself. The rain effect runs live, so the motion is constant and even rather than a sweep, which reads differently from every other family here.

The same scene is also drawn in anime, grunge and photoreal.

Violet has the lowest relative luminance of any saturated hue, which has one concrete consequence: white text on a violet fill passes a 4.5 to 1 contrast check easily, where the same text on an equally bright yellow fails. That makes it the easiest accent to build buttons and ribbons from without checking every pairing.

See every violet design.