What Kind of Artwork Is Featured on Make Today Colourful?

Updated

Make Today Colourful is a poetry-and-pictures site whose visual work centres on Teletext art — images and animations built from the blocky graphics and limited colour palette of the old broadcast text service. The pieces shown are mostly made for the weekly community prompt #WeeklyTeletextArt, and they range from quiet domestic scenes to object studies and spoof advertising.

The dominant form: Teletext art

Teletext was a text-and-block-graphics system, so its art looks distinctive: chunky shapes, a restricted set of bright colours, and text treated as part of the picture. On this site that constraint is the point rather than a limitation. The works are presented as finished pieces with short descriptions, and several are explicitly labelled as contributions to #WeeklyTeletextArt.

Two formats appear:

  • Static images — single-frame scenes and mock adverts.
  • Animations — at least one piece is described as an animation, with a character moving across frames.

Subject matter

The subjects are everyday and playful rather than abstract. From the works described on the site:

Piece What it shows
Barbecue Three terraced houses with colour-matched doors and roller blinds; unseen neighbours call out to each other
Time Machine Watch A digital watch reading 6:13:40, on a blue background with coloured stripes
Spaceship A Tetris-style spaceship rendered in graphics mode, with zeroes standing in for smoke
Octopus Suitcase A black-and-white spoof advert in which an octopus packs a suitcase
The Mechanical Turk An animation of the fake chess-playing automaton, whose expression changes as it moves a piece

A few patterns stand out. Domestic and suburban life (houses, neighbours, a barbecue) sits alongside objects (a watch, a suitcase) and pop-culture references (Tetris, the Mechanical Turk). Humour is common, especially in the spoof advert, which mimics the tone of a Ceefax-era commercial and even includes a disclaimer that it is "not endorsed by Ceefax Holidays."

Collaboration and community

Not every piece is solo work. Spaceship is credited as a collaboration with Dan Farrimond: he drew the ship at "Level 1," and the site's author added "Level 2.5" elements. The numbering refers to Teletext's graphics levels, so the collaboration is also a demonstration of how the medium's technical layers can be split between artists.

The #WeeklyTeletextArt tag ties the collection to a recurring shared prompt, which explains why the pieces are varied in subject but consistent in style and format.

What to expect if you visit

The artwork is browsable as a paginated gallery — the index runs to at least 13 pages, with each entry giving a title, a short description of what the image contains, and a posting date. If you are looking for a specific kind of piece, the descriptions are detailed enough to identify it before you open it: they name colours, describe layouts, and quote any text in the image.

The site pairs these pictures with poetry, so the visual work is one half of a broader creative project rather than a standalone art portfolio.