Color Flower

 

Stacey and I ran a online color-naming experiment back in February of 2007. Shortly afterwards, we whipped up a quick visualization that illustrated where our participants felt color boundaries existed (e.g., where brown ends and red begins). We circulated it amongst friends, but never posted it online. I had mostly forgotten about the project until Dolores Labs posted an article on their blog titled "Where does 'Blue' end and 'Red' begin?" In addition to providing a nifty color explorer, they also generously made their 10,000 data points freely available.

I was excited about creating a new visualization not only because I had gobs of new data, but also because color was pretty and fun to play with. The resulting visualizations, all of which are aesthetically leaning, use a combined set of 16,276 data points (named colors). The images below illustrate various avenues I explored, but my favorite of the bunch was what I dubbed a Color Flower, in which names are colorized and radiate from the center according to their hue. I threw in some randomization to make the visualization more organic and texturally rich.

 

Color Flower name label visualization

 

Color Flower name label visualization

 

Color Flower name label visualization

 

Color Flower name label visualization

 

 

Other Renditions
color name visualization
color name visualization
color name visualization
color name visualization

color name visualization

 

 

   
chris.harrison@cs.cmu.edu
© Chris Harrison