COLOR ANALYTICS AND VISUALIZATIONS
While living in New Mexico and standing in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in her home in Abiquiú, I imagined lifting the colors off of the canvas, one pixel at a time. As they floated around me, I attempted to sort them based on Hue, Saturation, etc. It was too much for my mind to comprehend, and all of the pixels fell to the floor. But that was the inspiration I needed.
I went back home and began to write the code to analyze the colors from an image to repurpose them as swatches for a painting application I was developing. The first step was sampling the colors, converting the format from hex to HSV, storing the color values, and sorting them. I ended up with a sorted array of color values, which was impossible to validate how well the algorithm worked.
I needed to visualize this data.
And that is essentially how these color visualizations were born. A circle represents each color, and it is located within a 2d color space. The Hue is on the x-axis, Saturation, and Brightness along the y-axis. The popularity of the color defines the scale of the circle. The more popular it is, the larger the circle. Below is a series of color visualizations based on the custom application and plug-ins I developed.
Apple Raspberry-Lemonade Gum w/Whipped Cream and Licorice
Berry Good Cream Italian Soda
Cherry Blueberry Italian Soda
Cinnamon, Cherry Vanilla + Licorice Gum
Grape Lemonade Italian Soda
Jolly Rancher Green Apple, Blue Rasperry + Licorice Gum
Illustrator + Flickr +
In The Mod mash-up
This video shows the first custom Flash plug-in hack of Adobe Illustrator. Undocumented in 2007, I was able to search, retrieve, and analyze images from Flickr. The color analytics algorithm in the plug-in generated the visualization of the colors. If I liked the color palette, I saved the colors to Illustrator. This magic was courtesy of a hack that established two-way communication between Illustrator and the plug-in.
It was first presented to the public for the first time in 2007 at Flash On The Beach in Brighton, UK. It later became the inspiration for an easier-to-use plug-in architecture, opening up the ability to extend Adobe's Creative Suite to a wide range of developers.
