Towel Day: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Generative Art

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Today is Towel Day. We spent it doodling around the visual mythology of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Douglas Adams left behind one of science fiction's deepest visual vocabularies. Fjords carved by award-winning planet designers. Constructor fleets parked over Earth, beaming down demolition notices. A small, drying towel held aloft as a sign that the hitchhiker is together enough to know where their towel is. Three sketches below, each leaning on a different piece of that vocabulary.

The Coast of Norway, in Progress

Coastline of Earth Mk II under construction, with a scaffolded design rig overhead

Slartibartfast on his scaffolding, dangling weathering pots over the working face of Earth Mk II. The trusses hold the design rig in place above the planet's surface. The wavy lines below are the coastline being painted in, one geological epoch at a time. Norway is in there somewhere, waiting for the award.

Vogon Demolition Notice

Four Vogon constructor ships in orbit over a purple Earth, demolition tractor beams descending toward the surface

Four constructor ships in orbit. A purple Earth below. Hyperspace bypass on the clipboard. The plans, of course, were available in the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so there is no point acting all surprised about it.

Fjord Patterns

Layered teal and green contour lines suggesting a topographic coastline of fjords

Pure Slartibartfast. He won an award for these.

A digital towel

Every piece above started as a single stroke on the canvas and grew from there. If you want to remix any of them, the lineage is preserved on Grovetracks: branch from the original and your version inherits the credit chain back to the source, the way fjords inherit from their designers.

Now where did we leave that towel.