David Aerne

Computational Designer · Interaction Developer
Software Artist Zürich

I have a weakness for going down rabbit holes. A question about color turns into a software project. An old book leads to a generative experiment. A tiny interface annoyance becomes a tool that takes weeks to build.

I enjoy figuring things out, experimenting and occasionally taking an idea much further than originally intended. Code, art and design are simply different ways for me to do that.

Through Elastiq, I help teams turn complicated ideas into things that are useful and enjoyable to use. And when an idea is too niche, too weird or simply too fun not to pursue, I build it myself, like the projects below.

Projects I'm particularly proud of

Color Names

It started because Wikipedia's color names weren't nearly enough for me. Different reds shared the same name, and some of the existing names had histories I wasn't comfortable perpetuating. So I started collecting, curating and inventing better ones. 32,000 names later, it's become an ongoing personal project, a playground for data visualisation, and an excuse to name colors wherever I travel. Many of them have stories attached or remind me of a particular place, person or moment.

Poline

I stumbled across a simple idea: draw a straight line through a polar representation of color and see what happens. The resulting palettes were surprisingly beautiful. Poline grew out of that discovery. I kept playing with the idea, adding controls and experimenting with different ways of generating palettes.

RYBitten

I've always been fascinated by the way people throughout history have tried to organise and explain color. With RYBitten, I can recreate color wheels from historical color books and see how they work. It's also a good reason to keep digging through old books about color.

heerich.js

I love Erwin Heerich's work, particularly its clarity, geometry and restrained use of form. It also connects to my longstanding love of pixel art and minimal 3D. So I built a tiny engine that turns some of these ideas into plain SVG, to see how far I could push such a simple format.

Charcuterie

I grew up with MS-DOS interfaces and the weird, wonderful typography in .NFO files. Unicode characters have been my icons ever since. Finding the right ones was always a pain, so when I wanted to experiment with embeddings, I finally had my pretext for building my own tool.

OKpalette

For years, I searched for the perfect library to extract dominant colors from images. Everything I tried had shortcomings, so I kept experimenting until I had something that extracted the colors I would have chosen by hand. That became OKpalette.

Ray Color

When we moved into our flat, I installed Philips Hue lights and noticed a tennis ball on the floor being lit from different directions. I started wondering what would happen if I sampled its colors under different lighting conditions. That observation became Ray Color, a tool for generating palettes by changing the conditions around an object rather than manually choosing individual colors. I like that I can move a light and watch the palette shift, while its colors still feel related.

PickyPalette

Pixel artists have always amazed me with how they shape their palettes. Creating a palette is as much an art as placing the pixels: when you restrict yourself to a few colors, every one of them counts. Inspired by tools that analyse palettes after the fact, I built a way to sculpt a palette directly on the color model itself. I love the almost tactile feeling of mixing colors and seeing how distinct or close each one is to the rest of the set.

A bit about me

I grew up bilingual in Fribourg, obsessed with Lego and pretty much anything nerdy. My parents were against TV and video game consoles, so I'm forever grateful to my godfather for getting me the Game Boy I wasn't allowed to have, and to my uncles, who owned a suspiciously large number of consoles. (Apologies to all the parents in Fribourg whose doorbells I rang at 7 in the morning to ask if their kids could play NES with me.)

As a teenager, I started Frilan, organising a big LAN party in Fribourg. Later came graffiti, DJing, and a record collection that's still far too large. Looking back, they all had something in common: making things, experimenting, finding a scene, and sharing something with other people.

For a long time, I couldn't decide between art school and an apprenticeship as a software engineer. I chose the latter, but never let go of the creative side. For years, I bounced between the two, until I realised I didn't have to choose. I could make a living doing both.

That turned out to be my favourite kind of life hack: getting paid to be curious about the things I love. Most days, it barely feels like work.

Today, I run Elastiq in Zürich and look after the z43 co-working space. I love sharing what I learn, whether that's speaking at conferences and universities or teaching creative programming to beginners, for free. With Elastiq, I work at the intersection of design and technology. My own projects give me the freedom to follow ideas wherever they lead, learn by making, and share what I discover with others.

I rarely consider a project finished. I release things when they're good enough to be useful and presentable, then keep refining, expanding and occasionally breaking them for years. Open source is a big part of that: it's nice seeing people use my tools in ways I hadn't anticipated, or take them somewhere completely different.

Along the way, I've had the chance to work with artists I admire, including Rik Oostenbroek on Verloop — Dégradé, a book exploring color and gradients. In 2026, I was genuinely surprised to win a Swiss Design Award in the Interaction Design category for my work around color.

I still mostly follow my curiosity, make things I wish existed, and share them in the hope that someone else finds them useful, inspiring, or simply fun to play with.

Want to support my work?

I'd love to keep exploring color and building tools, but open-source projects need time and infrastructure, and I need to make a living, too.

If you've found something useful here, you can adopt a color. Each color can be adopted just once, making you its one and only patron, with your name attached to it. Your support helps keep Color Names, its API and my other open-source projects running.

You can also sponsor me on GitHub, or work with me through Elastiq.