Fragments Early Access — Mesh Gradient

Content complete!

I'm really excited to say that with the release of the Mesh Gradient technique, Fragments is now content complete for launch!

It's been an amazing journey, and I've loved every minute of it. Fragments is a passion project of mine that I've been working on for the best part of a year now. One of the most creatively fulfilling things I've done in a really long time.

I'm so proud of what I've been able to create, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to share it with you all!

With that said, let's get into this update!

The Mesh Gradient technique

The final technique breakdown for launch is all about Mesh Gradients, and it's one of my absolute favourites in the whole collection.

I don't know if I've made this really clear, but I love Mesh Gradients - the shapes, the texture, the patterns, the colours - it's just an immensely satisfying and creative technique to work with.

I've spent years creating different versions of this technique, and I've learned a lot about what makes a really good one, and that's what I think I've created with this one.

One of my favourite parts about it is that it brings together a lot of different techniques, and layers them together to produce something magical. It's a technique that really feels like your knowledge compounds in an interesting way.

This one lands in the intermediate level of difficulty, as it's based quite heavily on other techniques that we've covered in Fragments so far. It's a really fun change of pace from the high complexity of Pixel Sorting.

The Mesh series

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time working with Mesh Gradients in a variety of different forms - and a few of those made their way into the Mesh series of sketches.

Since I created those, I've learned so much more about what I like and don't like about mesh gradients, so I've refreshed the series with this new approach that appears in the Mesh Gradient technique. I love the results of this, and it's far simpler than what I was doing before.

The last week of early access

Early access with its 40% discount is coming to a close next week on October 1st. It's going to be the last time you can get Fragments at this price, so if you've been thinking about it, now is the time to jump in! There will be a smaller launch discount for a short period of time after early access closes.

I'm also in the process of sorting out Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) after quite a few requests. I want to get this in place for launch, but it may not happen. If you need help with this, please let me know and we can work something out.

As for what's happening with Fragments over the last week - here's a snapshot of what I'll be working on:

Add clear content progression

I've made some small changes to the order of techniques to give an idea of how difficult I think they are, as well as giving some more clear indication of the difficulty level. That change is now on the Techniques page.

Some of the more advanced techniques like Flow Fields and Pixel Sorting do have a lot of built-in complexity, so it might be worth ensuring content ramps up to that rather than having it interspersed throughout.

I want each technique to be completely self-contained, so if you're just diving into something, it is fully actualised in that section; but there will always be overlap.

As part of that, I'll add some information about techniques that would be useful to have looked at before diving into a technique.

Sketch breakdown backfill

I've added a lot of new sketches with the techniques that I've written over the last month. Now that all of the techniques are complete, I'm going to make sure the sketches have breakdowns to go alongside them. This will probably be ongoing for a while, but I'll get to it as quickly as I can.

Along with this, all of the utilities will be fully documented and included in the boilerplate projects.

Website quality of life (QoL) updates

So, a little thing called iOS26 just came out, and there are a bunch of changes to mobile Safari that I need to route out. As part of this process, the whole site will be undergoing a lot of improvements and updates to make sure that everything is faster, smoother and more responsive.

Creating Fragments has been an interesting process - swinging back and forth between a lot of fun creative work with TSL, to a ton of technical work with the website, backend and associated services. Needless to say, I'm swinging back to the technical side of things for a while.

Feedback improvements

I've loved all of the feedback (constructive and otherwise!) that you've been giving me over the last few weeks, so I'll be making sure that all of that is addressed on the site itself so everything is as smooth as possible.

Signal boosting

I've been sharing some insights over on X (Twitter) that I've found to be really helpful - little posts with nuggets and TSL functions that I've found useful over the journey. A lot of these are featured in the Utilities section of Fragments, as well as available in the Github repo.

• Vignette Effect - Adding a vignette effect to your work
• Tonemapping Functions - Using different tonemapping functions to create different moods
• Grain Texture Effect - Adding a grain texture effect to your work
• screenAspectUV - Getting aspect-corrected UVs for the screen

X is a great place to share little posts like this, which I'll be doing more often in the future, so I'd love it if you gave me a follow and a like or repost if you've found them useful as well.

Again, if you have any questions, or feedback, or just want to chat about what I'm doing - you can get in touch with me by replying to this email, or sending me a message on X (Twitter).