Fair, I was fine going this direction because you're a click a way from get the full view and with the hover there isn't much more "preview" to show. My number one priority with the hover was making it obvious the given thumb is interactive.
Thanks, I've designed a few UIs for manipulating graphics and spent a few tries iterating and improving this one in particular. There was a need to show as much background as possible, sometimes the limitations lead to some creative choices. I'm quite pleased how it came out myself.
No I've never heard about Rule 30, I would have been nervous to click that link if it wasn't leading to a Wikipedia article, phew, but the concept is quite cool and inspiring. Thanks for sharing that with me!
Hey great eye. I generally design in Illustrator with a plugin by Astute graphics that allows me to reduce unnecessary anchor points, run the exported SVG through SVGOMG, and then spend solid time hand coding each background in VS Code with the SVG extension by Jock that let's me see a live preview. Then on the actual site the customizer script I wrote will catch some attributes that aren't needed and remove them, but it's far from perfect.
Lea Verou got me started on this particular technique, the gotcha is that you have to escape the hash characters with %023. Her presentations can be found on Youtube, and Lea also has a fab website.
I'm not familiar with, and have not tried, any of the Jetbrains tools.
When you say psuedocode, are you talking ::before ::after or something else? I've used svg icons on elements as background-image DataURIs -- probably similar if not the same thing. Yes I know who Lea Verou is and she's influenced one of my SVG tools I've released.
