ColorFlower

Stacey and I ran an 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.

High Resolution JPG (11000x11000)

Adobe PDF (vector file)

Other Renderings