The Midcentury Modern Design Collection
A growing collection of original midcentury modern patterns, fonts and icons, inspired by Palm Springs architecture and 1950s issues of Arts & Architecture, published as an Astro 7 site.
- Astro 7
- Tailwind 4
- Splide
- astro-icon
- exifr
- Netlify
Visit siteSource on GitHubStarted March 2026
In 2013 I took a trip to Palm Springs and came back fixated on its midcentury modern architecture. That trip, plus a stack of back issues of Arts & Architecture from the 1940s and 50s and a deep Pinterest rabbit hole of 1950s lamps, glassware and tableware, eventually turned into a body of pattern and type work. This site is where that collection lives.
What’s in it
- Patterns — repeating motifs drawn from atomic-age forms, boomerangs, starbursts and the color palettes of the era, each with its own detail page.
- Fonts — original display typefaces in the midcentury spirit, presented with specimens.
- Icons — a set of period-appropriate glyphs and marks.
How it’s built
Each of the three collections is an Astro content collection, so adding a pattern or font is a matter of dropping in a markdown file and an image. Image titles and alt text are read from the files’ own XMP/IPTC metadata with exifr rather than maintained by hand, the same approach used across my other sites. The homepage carousel runs on Splide, sitemaps are generated at build time, and a small API route handles newsletter signups. It deploys to Netlify.
