A base — Obsidian’s saved query over the vault, see
3.1 – Bases — can show its entries as a gallery or as
cards. Both views take an option image: that names a property; its value may be a wikilink
to an image, a path or a hex colour. Without it every tile shows the same hatched placeholder.
This site uses the field cover for it:
---
cover: "[[assets/covers/cover-links.svg]]"
---Every page from chapter 2 carries it — 63 pages per language, one image per section and one for
the chapter page, fourteen images in all. The bases All views and Formatting pages say with
image: cover that they read this field; the gallery under
All views shows the result.
Where the images live
In the vault under assets/covers/, like all media of this site: there the vault’s git versions
them, and there Obsidian finds them while writing. The fourteen images are generated, not drawn —
a script in QuartzControl’s repository writes them.
The colours are deliberately close together: the same band of brightness, little saturation, around the navy and the sienna of the palette. Fourteen full colours would be the loudest thing on a site whose whole argument is restraint. A motif, no text: the title stands under the tile, and an image that repeats it is an image wasted.
For your own pages
The field may have any name; it only has to carry the same name under image: in the base. A
photo does the job as well as an SVG. A page without the field gets the placeholder in the gallery
— not an error, just an empty tile.