Five heroes

Backgrounds for the hero, drawn from a Figma pack of AI renders. Each is a different relationship between the type and the picture, not one treatment with the photograph swapped out. Ranked.

Every option keeps the composition on paper: the type never sits on the photograph, and each section fades out on an eased ramp so nothing ends on a line. All contrast measured off the painted pixels — the lowest reading in the set is 4.9:1, against AA's 4.5.

  1. 1 The meadow

    The photograph is under the composition rather than behind it. Its sky is masked away and the canvas takes its place, so the picture dissolves into paper at the top and again at the floor of the section.

    Why it is here. The warmest of the set, and the only landscape whose own colours — ochre grass, dust, a rust-coloured tree — are already the page's palette rather than an addition to it.

  2. 2 The valley

    The same treatment on a misted valley: sky removed, ground kept, the path running up the middle of the composition toward the headline.

    Why it is here. Its sky measures 93% luminance against the canvas's 99%, so the dissolve has almost no value to cross and the join is invisible. The mist does most of the work the mask would otherwise have to do.

  3. 3 The ledge

    Not a background. The render's sky is flat enough to key away, which leaves two rock shapes standing in the bottom corners with the composition between them. Nothing sits behind the type at all.

    Why it is here. The only one of the five that adds a drawing to the page instead of replacing the page's ground with a photograph — so it is the only one that leaves the site's "plain files, printed page" character intact.

  4. 4 The field

    Grass along the floor with two pale stone forms resting in it, everything above the horizon dissolved into canvas.

    Why it is here. The quietest. The stones are the only hard shapes in the whole set and they read as sculpture rather than as scenery, which keeps the hero from becoming a photograph of a place.

  5. 5 The wash

    No subject at all: no horizon, no sky, no object. A soft green movement across the lower field, and paper everywhere the type is.

    Why it is here. The cheapest by far — 37 KB — and the only one where the question is simply whether the sheet should be white, with nothing else to argue about. Held at 85% so it stays a tint rather than a ground.