brushes.paints.stencils.

With companies like Pantone and sites like kuler, darius’ COLOURlovers and In The Mod: Color Analytics, we celebrate and share a common goal – we are in search of beautiful color palettes. Our approach and methods of defining our treasured palettes may be similar, like using a community to build our databases. It also may greatly differ – whereas I imagine Pantone has a team of color experts and In The Mod relies on the colors deconstructed from (in)famous paintings using color analytic algorithms in order to find that emotionally provocative set of colors. With that in mind… I would like to share with you, what I believe to be, a new method that I am calling Color Combinatorics.

Centre Le Corbusier

Color Combinatorics: Inspiration
The idea is simple enough and came to me as I as sitting in front of the Centre for Le Corbusier in Zürich at the beginning of the year. If I took I took the 5 colors (Yellow, White, Green, Red + Black) of the home and mixed them in sets of 3, how many variations would I come up with? 5^3 = 125 sets. Out of the 125 sets what would be the optimal number, where optimal would equal aesthetically pleasing. And so that idea stayed in the back of my mind until this weekend.

As I finished creating my last set of prints, Dr. Woohoo’s New Gum + Snow Cone Flavors, I began to think about the process of how to find the ideal set of color combinations. I came across an article on COLOURlovers, Pantone Unveils Top 10 Colors for Fall 2007, which in turn lead me to Paints+Interiors. In the article, Pantone asks 21 ‘designers to translate their spring 2007 fashion colors to interior paint colors’. A single color was defined by each designer and I began to notice some colors that would look great in sets. I could manually mix and match the colors into sets of 3… let’s that would be 21^3 = 9,261 possible combinations. Ouch. LOL. I could settle for manually creating a manageable number of sets… but it’s in my nature to be systematic and this is where Color Combinatorics comes to life.

Color Combinatorics: Defined
Color Combinatorics – playing off of the branch of mathematics called Combinatorics – is the process of creating a finite number of color object sets based on a collection of individual colors, eventually optimizing the library by eliminating aesthetically displeasing sets. In other words, for this experiment I wanted to write some code that would take the 21 selected colors from the Pantone article and create the 9,261 sets of variations by using the new two-way communication between Photoshop CS3 and MATLAB. For those of you unfamiliar with MATLAB, here is how MathWorks, the makers of MATLAB, define it:

‘MATLAB is a high-level language and interactive environment that enables you to perform computationally intensive tasks faster than with traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran.

You can use MATLAB in a wide range of applications, including signal and image processing, communications, control design, test and measurement, financial modeling and analysis, and computational biology. Add-on toolboxes (collections of special-purpose MATLAB functions, available separately) extend the MATLAB environment to solve particular classes of problems in these application areas.’

For me, it simply means that we can now ‘drive’ Photoshop by writing code in MATLAB while taking advantage of a *very* powerful engine with a superior supporting set of libraries (called ToolBoxes). Think of MATLAB as giving you the ability to write your own plug-ins for PS. In relation to Color Combinatorics, I created an algorithm in which I feed it the Pantone colors in return it creates a matrix filled with all of the possible variations. After that is complete, it populates a new multi-dimensional array (Height x Width x 3 - where 3 represents R, G, B) with all of the variations. When that is complete, it passes that matrix back to PS CS3 and creates a PS document with 9,261 sets of color swatches. Very sweet! You can view the final render on my Flickr account.

Mental note: Beg Adobe to establish two-communication between MATLAB with Illustrator and AE.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Inspiration, Experiments, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.