Color flowers, networks, photos, and even 3D
April 25th, 2008 by Brendan O'ConnorLots of people have been making great new visualizations of our color names data. Here are 4 more that folks have sent us.
Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student at CMU HCI, combined our data with results from his own previous experiment, and created beautiful flower and spiral images. Unlike my and Martin’s color wheels, hue is scaled along the radius, creating a striking effect.
Next: network and cluster diagrams from David Sparks, Ph.D. student at Duke PoliSci. The layout below was computed from a similarity metric on color names. (I’m unclear whether it’s on labels or colors.) Size of node corresponds to the label’s frequency.
All of the visualizations so far have had to map three-dimensional color points into a 2D space. But Jeff Clark in Toronto went ahead and wrote a 3D explorer — you fly around a space of the color labels. He built it with the excellent Processing framework.
Finally, yet another tack: instead of creating a picture with all the labels, why not fit labels to a picture? Kristina Durivage, Chris Burg, and Scott Olson did that for an undergrad CS project at Winona State University. Their software takes any image and overlays color names. An example:
Four new visualizations in a month — whew!
To look at all our color posts, check out blog.doloreslabs.com/topics/colors.







August 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
I think these are really nice. I have saved these images in my PC. I just need some more of these could you please suggest me any URL. I want more of these pics.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Hi, where can I see more about this project? I’m making a reasearch about colour names and images, and I think we could share some information! I’m from Brasil so I research names and expressions in english and portuguese. Please, if possible send me a email with more info.
Thank you very much, Leticia