We photograph our gradients. We don't compute them.

People sometimes ask which tool makes the soft colour behind our pages. The honest answer is a camera. The blues, the warm yellows and the deep night tones you see on Paftane, and in the work we make for clients, began as photographs of real things. We call them plates.

Four moods, one ramp

Our light comes in four moods. Morning runs from Air to Petal, pale and quiet. Noon is Sky, the clear blue of the middle of the day. Golden runs from Petal to Pollen, the warm end of the afternoon. Night runs from Night to Sky, the deep blue just after the sun has gone.

Every plate belongs to one of them. That gives us a vocabulary as well as a palette. A dental studio that wants to feel calm and bright gets Morning. A roastery that runs warm gets Golden. A robot that works the night shift gets Night. The mood is chosen on the first sheet, with the client, before any design starts.

One rule follows from this. Golden plates never share a frame with blue ones. Warm and cool light side by side read as two different places, and our pages should feel like one.

Photo, defocus, grade, grain, cell

A plate is made in five steps, always in the same order.

1. Photo. Our own frame of something real: flowers seen from below, a stretch of sky, light on a wall, wet paint, a field.
2. Defocus. We crop on a focal point and blur until the subject turns into light. You cannot tell what it was. You can still feel that it was something.
3. Grade. A gradient map pulls the photograph into one of the four moods. Yellow stays only where the photo was yellow, inside a ring of Petal.
4. Grain. Optional, and only for print, posters and tactile moments. Plates on screens ship clean.
5. Cell. Sometimes, one sharp rectangle sits inside the blur: a pafta cell. Something comes into focus.

Photo

Defocused

A computed gradient is perfect, which is exactly what is wrong with it.

That last step is the whole idea of the brand in one picture. Paftane means a sheet of a larger plan, and our line is hope, coming into focus. The plate is the hope. The cell is the moment it becomes a plan.

Why not compute them?

A gradient drawn by code is smooth in a way nothing in the world is. It has no edge where the light caught a petal, no slight shift where a wall changed texture. Visitors do not see these things one by one. They notice when they are missing. A computed gradient reads as a background. A photographed one reads as a place.

We also do not use CSS gradients or blurred shapes drawn by the browser. A plate is one image, prepared once, the same on every screen.

One light per screen

Plates are strong, so we ration them. Each screen of a Paftane page carries one light: a plate, a scene, or the living light in our home page hero. Never two. The rest of the page is Petal, the warm white that carries the type.

This is what keeps the pages calm. A plate gets the whole screen to itself, and the words beside it get room to breathe. When a page needs a second picture, we scroll to the next screen rather than squeeze it in.

A different sky for every client

Because plates come from photographs, we can make new ones. Our library holds a dozen beyond the four mood sets, and it grows with every project. A client does not borrow our sky. They get one chosen, or photographed, for them.

Orsa Sailing, the sailing-holiday booking platform, has a plate from the library that sits closest to sailcloth and sea: pale at one edge, deep Aegean blue at the other. It carries their case study here. We draw the same care into every web product, down to the colour behind the forms.

Why it stays still on a slow phone

A plate is a still image. It costs one download and nothing after. It does not redraw itself every frame, warm the phone or wait for a graphics chip. On an old phone on a weak signal, it looks exactly as it does on our screens.

When we do use moving light, it starts as a plate. The still poster appears first and the motion takes over only if the device can carry it. With reduced motion switched on, the plate is all there is, and the page is complete. We wrote about the rules behind that in the speed budget behind a calm website.

The sky is part of the brief

If you would like your own light, bring it to the first call. It is free. Or start a sheet and we will draw the mood on it with you.