Some time in the early ’80s, my mom saw an article in Redbook magazine with a headline like: “Add a Modern Accent to Any Wall Using Bold Stripes” and decided we should paint a striped mural in our unfinished basement. Since the basement walls were going to be repainted anyway, she said I could go to town and paint whatever I wanted before she got around to it. I decided on a scene of majestic dinosaurs roaming a prehistoric landscape. I remember it looking like this:

But it was probably more like this:

I thought for sure my mom would change her mind and decide that this was actually a better approach to achieving the modern accent she was going for.

I was pretty upset when, instead, she went right ahead and started applying the primer over my masterpiece. But she worked through it with me and suggested that since the repainting was inevitable, I might as well help her out. She instructed me in the ways of proper tape-masking and even let me decide which stripe should be the mustard yellow and which one should be the avocado green.

The finished project is still visible to this day if you look behind my dad’s museum-quality collection of outdated electronics.

We must’ve ended up having a nice time together, because I’m reminded of some fond feelings whenever I see these “graphic stripes” in use today. And apparently I’m not the only one, since they’ve been back on the scene for a while as the go-to motif for people hoping to achieve an ’80s vibe.

While tinkering around with PS5.js, I ended up making an interactive doo-dad that will randomly generate some of these stripes and send them across your screen. You can even add a few curves along the way.

So click the button below to sit back and watch these lovely stripes go on and on into the future, around and around from one generation of designers to the next.