What is Make Today Colourful?

Make Today Colourful (maketodaycolourful.co.uk) is a personal creative site that publishes poetry and pictures “to brighten your day.” Its most visible content is Teletext art — pictures built in the blocky, limited-colour style of old TV text services — posted as short blog entries with a title, a description of the image, and a date. You can browse it as a casual gallery; there is nothing to buy or sign up for on the pages shown.

What you will find on the site

Each post is a single artwork presented as a blog entry. The format is consistent:

• A title — often the name of the object or scene (“Barbecue”, “Time Machine Watch”, “Spaceship”, “Octopus Suitcase”, “The Mechanical Turk”).
• A description — a plain-text explanation of what the image shows, including colours, layout, and any text inside the artwork.
• A date — the posting date, sometimes with an earlier date beneath it.

The descriptions are detailed enough to follow the joke or idea even before you look closely at the image. For example, the “Barbecue” piece describes three terraced houses with roller blinds matching their doors (cyan, white, magenta), birds in a cloudless sky, and neighbours calling out “Shall we have a barbecue?”, “Bring the washing in!”, and “Let’s go to the park!”

The Teletext style

Several pieces are labelled as artwork for #WeeklyTeletextArt, a recurring tag that suggests a shared weekly drawing theme among Teletext artists. The visual rules of the format shape what you see:

“Time Machine Watch” is a good example of the format’s charm: a digital watch reading 6:13:40 — the time the artist started the piece — on a blue background with green, yellow, red, and magenta stripes.

Collaboration and humour

Not every piece is solo. “Spaceship” is credited as a collaboration with Dan Farrimond: Dan drew the spaceship at “Level 1,” and the site’s author added “Level 2.5” elements, with zeroes standing in for smoke. Others are spoofs — “Octopus Suitcase” is a fake black-and-white advert in which trained operatives pack your luggage, offering “ten percent off for Ceefax Holidays customers” and noting “Not endorsed by Ceefax Holidays.”

How to browse it

The site works like a standard blog archive:

1. Open the homepage and read the most recent posts top to bottom.
2. Use the pagination at the bottom (Page 1, Page 2 … Page 13, Next page) to go further back.
3. Open an individual post to see the artwork at full size alongside its description.

There is no search, category filter, or index described on the pages shown, so pagination is the main way to move through the archive. If you want a quick sense of the style, start with “Barbecue” or “Octopus Suitcase” — both rely on a written joke that the description explains.

Who it is for

This is a site to dip into rather than use as a tool. It suits you if you:

• enjoy retro screen graphics and the constraints of Teletext as an art form;
• like short, gentle, observational humour;
• want a few minutes of browsing rather than a reference resource.

It is not a shop, a portfolio with commissions listed, or a tutorial site — at least not on the pages shown. A “subscribe” signal appears in the site data, but no pricing or sign-up details are visible, so treat any subscription option as something to check on the site itself rather than assume.

What to expect from the writing

The descriptions do the interpretive work. They tell you the colours, the objects, the text inside the image, and sometimes the making-of detail (the watch showing the start time; the collaboration split by levels). That makes the site readable even if the images are small or you are unfamiliar with Teletext. The tone is light and self-aware — spoof adverts, neighbourly punchlines, a chess-playing automaton who smiles as he moves a piece.

If you are researching Teletext art as a genre, this site works as one artist’s ongoing sketchbook within it, tied together by the #WeeklyTeletextArt tag and occasional collaborations.