How many colours should it have?

Four or five. Fewer reads as a plain gradient, more turns to mud because everything ends up blending into everything else.

Why does it look slightly out of focus?

Because there is nothing in it to be in focus. The softness is what stops the eye searching for a subject, and adding a sharp element anywhere breaks the effect.

Is an aurora gradient the same thing?

It is the same picture with a cooler palette and more movement in the shapes. The technique is identical.

Mesh Gradient

aurora gradient
blurred gradient
gradient blob
soft gradient

Several colour points bleeding into each other across one smooth field, with no edges at all.

Draw this style

Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.

What it is for

A field with no edges has nothing to read as an object, so it carries a mood without carrying a subject. That is exactly what a brand background needs, which is why every technology company arrived at the same picture at the same time.

How it works

Several colour points are placed across a field and interpolated smoothly between each other. Nothing has a boundary. Saturation stays high while contrast stays low, and the whole field is slightly soft, as though behind frosted glass.

When to use it

Use it for a background, a hero panel or anything that needs colour without a subject. Avoid it as a foreground, because a picture with no edges cannot hold a shape.

Told apart from its neighbours

Grainy Gradient is this with heavy noise in the transitions. Iridescent Gradient applies the same colour behaviour to a real form. Subsurface Character glows because light passes through a body rather than because colours are blended.

Where it is used

It carries a landing page background, a deck, an album cover and any surface that needs to feel modern and say nothing.

Software and finance branding
App backgrounds, decks and packaging

The prompt

Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.

<character> rendered as a mesh gradient, four or five colour points placed across the frame and blended smoothly into each other with no hard edge anywhere and no visible boundary between any two colours, the colours saturated but soft, the whole field slightly out of focus as though seen through frosted glass, rounded organic shapes suggested only by where one colour gives way to the next, a plain deep background, no line and no outline

Run it

What goes wrong

Two coloured shapes with a blur between them come back. Ask for four or five colour points blended with no boundary anywhere between any two.

Leave out

hard edges, an outline, noise, grain, a flat colour area, a sharp shape, a visible gradient stop

Watch for

No edge anywhere. A single hard boundary turns it into two shapes with a blur between them, which is a different and much more ordinary picture.

Questions

The colours sit on a grid of control points and the software interpolates between them, so the blend happens in two directions at once rather than along a single line.