About
A wallpaper site with no wallpapers in it.
Tessera started from a simple frustration. Wallpaper sites are heavy galleries of other people's photos, gated behind sign ups and ad walls, and the one image you like is never the right size for your screen. So this one holds no images at all. It holds a drawing engine.
Pick a family and a palette, give it a seed, and the engine paints a composition on a canvas. Change the seed and you get a different one. Ask for a 4K desktop or a tall phone screen and it redraws at exactly that size. The result downloads straight from your browser.
The Discover section is the one place Tessera shows photographs. It searches live across Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Wallhaven and NASA. Nothing is rehosted permanently: each image is fetched on demand and shown with its author, source and licence, and links back to the original.
Families
Palettes
Seeded starts
The families
Aurora
Layered ribbons of light drifting across a night sky.
Mesh
Soft blooms of colour melting into a smooth gradient.
Flow
Thousands of strokes tracing an invisible current.
Strata
Topographic ridges receding into haze.
Tessellate
A shattered mosaic of faceted glass.
Orbital
A quiet planet against deep space and a dust cloud.
Waveform
Stacked sine bands like a frozen equaliser.
Bauhaus
Primary shapes in a confident modernist grid.
Halftone
A print screen of dots swelling across a gradient.
Terrazzo
Scattered stone chips set in a pale floor.
Ripple
Slow rings spreading from points on still water.
Marble
Mineral veins pulled through polished stone.
Built with
- Next.js
- App Router, static output, React Server Components
- TypeScript
- Strict mode across the engine and the UI
- Canvas 2D
- Every wallpaper is drawn, never stored
- Motion
- Interface animation and scroll reveals
- Tailwind CSS
- Design tokens and the mosaic system
- Zustand
- The local shelf and theme, persisted to the browser
It is open source
The engine, the generators and this site are all MIT licensed. Fork it, add a family, make it yours.