caratulai

symbols, not pictures

Carátula (Spanish): the cover sheet — the first image you meet. Concepts go in, simple vector images in fundamental palettes come out — the lineage runs from the Voyager Golden Record through Picasso's line.

The Voyager Golden Record cover — a gold disc etched with playback instructions, a pulsar map, and a hydrogen atom
the ancestor — Voyager Golden Record, 1977 · NASA/JPL
View on GitHub Quick start

In practice: picture of a thing → symbol for it

conten.to's post covers were technically fine but denotative — pictures of the subject, not symbols for it. caratulai reads the generated image with a vision model, extracts the concepts, and re-renders them as a symbolic SVG seal — through whichever profile fits the post. These are the covers actually in use on conten.to today.

The Metro of Medellín

AI-generated post cover: a chaotic Medellín street scene beside the calm interior of a metro car
generated image raster cover — chaos on the street, reverence inside the metro car
Symbolic SVG caratula: an elevated metro line crossing a valley of mountains and houses, with a church, blooming flowers, and roots below
symbolic SVG · gabriel the metro as civic myth — a line across the valley, flowers in the sky, roots underneath

The New Job Market

AI-generated post cover: a craft-era workshop beside a room of holographic job-market dashboards
generated image raster cover — craft-era workshop, holographic job-market screens
Symbolic SVG caratula: a stick figure pushing a large spoked wheel along a measured track
symbolic SVG · rosina a figure pushing the wheel along a measured track — stark, unglamorous, essential 
./caratulai.sh generate --from-image https://conten.to/images/post/njm.png --profile rosina

Quick start

Requires Node ≥ 20 and pnpm.

git clone https://github.com/contento/caratulai
cd caratulai
pnpm install && pnpm build

./caratulai.sh generate star water travel --profile sagan --out out/idea.svg

Tags, narrative text, URLs, or images in — an SVG seal in a fundamental palette out. See the README and wiki for the full profile list, providers, and configuration.