I love how tech companies approach their branding aesthetics.
Anthropic's Engineering blog has these cute header images for each page. They're usually just decorative, but I've collected all 18 images from September 19, 2024 to January 21, 2026.
When you look at each one separately—and because Anthropic's blog posts are rare enough—you won't immediately notice how similar yet different each image is.
The first thing you'll notice is that each header image contains only a fixed set of basic shapes. Some include colors. You'll also realize each header is shaped like a 3×3 square grid, and it's just a permutation of how 1×1 and 2×2 squares are placed within. Notice how Anthropic used four 1.5×1.5 squares for three consecutive posts early on, but that pattern never appeared again. Now the pattern is always a single 2×2 plus five 1×1 cells.
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The colors are fixed too. The majority of shapes are black, and only one shape in each header is rendered in an accent color. It doesn't matter where the colored shape appears—it can be in either a 2×2 or 1×1 cell.
The color palette:
Opus 4.5 gave me this description for the palette: "A dusty, desaturated palette of muted earth tones and soft pastels—think of a quiet SF morning where the fog hasn't quite lifted and you're walking to Anthropic's office with a warm coffee in hand." Do you think that's accurate?
Also worth noting: they didn't use their signature Claude Orange (#D97757), but the desaturation level matches the logo's aesthetic.
We've now assembled the atomic assets (borrowing from the practice that for agents, atomic actions are key to good performance). Here comes the first artistic taste decision:
How are the basic shapes chosen?
The naive approach is to randomly select and place shapes from the overall bag for each square in the grid.
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so many dots…
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feels so heavy…
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so much information…
None of those results feel right. And in rare cases, you get patterns full of repetitions
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