Rainbow Connection Fonts

Chinese characters are written in a fixed stroke order. I mapped that same order to ROYGBIV, so every stroke takes the next color in the sequence, looping back to red whenever a character runs past seven. It started with surnames, then found its way to 愛, the character for love, which happens to read “Ai.” Fitting, in a year everyone’s talking about AI.

I’m Chinese and I’m gay, two parts of who I am that don’t always get to share the same sentence. This project is where they do. The rainbow isn’t incidental here, and neither is the idea of connection: strokes connecting into characters, colors connecting into a spectrum, all of us connecting to each other whether we notice it or not.

Every character on this page is hand-illustrated, stroke by stroke, so I could control exactly how each one looks rather than relying on a typeface. Type in a letter, a number, or pinyin (try “ai”) and watch it draw itself in, one stroke and one color at a time.

Built by vibe-coding the concept first, then handing it off to Claude Code for the real implementation: typing that resolves to characters, pinyin lookup, the ROYGBIV stroke logic, a size control, and the little draw-in animation you’re watching right now.

And if you read this far, yes, pink isn’t indigo but I don’t care 😂😂😂. Play around and see what you make down this page ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Consider this the first chapter. Rainbow Connection will keep growing, more characters, more symbols, more ways to play, and it may not stay a page on this site forever. Where it goes next is part of the fun.

Want the deeper dive?