Notes

I enjoy learning about how are people are using Processing.  Here’s a really great example of a animated flocking and forces on a sphere.

An animated infographic of yearly consumption of some guy in California.  I particularly like the beer graph and that’s the first I’ve seen of photographs being masked out to represent a graph.  It made for a good effect.

This is a really great example of information design for these illustrations.  It really sucks you into it.  I never thought I would be so interested in a graph before.  The colors on black really makes them pop.

It’s always interesting to browse through visualizations.  I found this information aesthetics blog with lots of them.  I will end up losing many hours here in the near future. I really like how colors are used for displaying varying information.  Pastels seem pretty popular right now.

All this work was based upon the original concept that I found at the Color Fields Colr Pickr.  Minus the silly name it was a pretty cool application.  I proceeded trying to develop my own without purchasing the guy’s book but was only able to obtain a few color values based upon the user tagging in the group mentioned in the Colr Pickr.  There was really only eight color tags in the group that I was able to find.  These didn’t amount for much of a color wheel but was an interesting experiment to be found in this Flickr Color Wheel that was created.

Create a Color Wheel from photographs on Flickr using Photoshop

1) Using Idée Labs Multicolor Search start by selecting the middle most value of red to display red photographs. Select one that is mostly abstract and with the most color consistency through the image.

2) Open the larger sized photo on Flickr and copy an image to clipboard then paste into a new Photoshop file set to 333 x 333 pixels in dimension.  Once in Photoshop select all of the image with a marquee selection and copy to the clipboard. This will crop off extra dimensions to make the image square.

3) Create a new Photoshop file at 2000 x 1500 pixels.  Create a 1450 x 1450 pixel circle as a guide for placing the photo color swatches. Paste the square image in the clipboard into this file and position it at the top most point of the circle.

4) Repeat steps 1-3 while selecting the color swatch to the right of red.  When pasting the square image place it so it overlaps half of the past image and so that images begin to go around the circle in a clock-wise direction.  Continue this process until all of the colors are used.

5) Create a 900 x 900 pixel circle as a guide and follow step 4 but select the darker color value.  Move this layer below the previous ring and repeat step 4. This will create the middle ring that should have more black that the outer ring of images.

6) Repeat step 5 but using a 500 x 500 pixel circle instead and use the darkest most color value.

7) Select a black image and position it as the bottom most layer and in the middle of the color wheel.

Create a Color Strip from photographs on Flickr using Photoshop

1) Repeat step 1 of Color Wheel but select the top most color value that is the closest to white.

2) Copy the thumbnail image from the search results so that only one file is needed.

3) Create a new Photoshop file at 75 x 150 pixels and paste in the first thumbnail and position it to the left.

4) Repeat steps 1 – 3 while selecting the next color swatch to the right.  When on step 3 position the image so it overlaps the previous image but is moved 15 pixels to the right of the previous image’s left most position.

The resulting imagery should roughly resemble something like what is shown below.

This is an interesting info-graphic found on Flickr to display the interconnections of photo tags.

This AR.drone has to be one of the most interesting applications of the iPhone that I have ever seen.  An iPhone is used to control a wireless helicopter with an on-board camera.  It comes included with two augmented reality games.

An iMac setup for augmented reality at the Allard Pierson Museum for their the Future for the Past exhibition.

A German augmented reality game at a Museum in Austria.

This Kuler application from Adobe came out some time ago but I’ve never really utilized it all that much.  In taking another look, they had an interesting new section that visualizes the community’s color usage. I like to see how many colors are thrown out in general. This certainly brings down the possibilities to something more manageable.