Image grid from view with randomly inserted colored squares
My solution was fairly simple.  I created a new content type called "Homepage Grid Spacer" and used auto_nodetitle to suppress the title.  I created a single field of the jQuery Colorpicker type and deleted the body.  Now the admin can insert these decorative squares between actual flagged content by creating and flagging them in the same fashion.

I updated my view to select the color code and suppress the image field of the actual content and I used the rewrite to add a div with the color in a data field.  I couldn't add the field in a style because Drupal doesn't allow this.  Then I added a couple lines of JavaScript to take the data color and make that the CSS background color.