find the color of
sensations places sounds days
These are some examples of colors derived from the system, sometimes reflecting our expectations of what it should be, but sometimes not.
This is a system created to find out the colour of anything, by querying and aggregating image data from Flickr, a popular online photo sharing community. It is an attempt at answering a potentially complex and abstract question in an objective manner, by using simple algorithms on data originating from subjective human perceptions.
This application is built and designed by Fung Kwok Pan, a product and interaction designer based in Singapore. His work strives towards an equilibrium between form and function. As such, his creative processes range widely from experiments in building, juxtaposing and challenging typologies, to observing human behavior.
 
The Color Of will be going through a major system overhaul to develop more features, encouraged by increased interest.

New orders for prints will be temporarily unavailable as we seek out the best way to offer this service.

Meanwhile, please continue using the site and share the images with your friends. Do watch this space or press the 'like' button to get updated.

Search for something and watch how it is derived.

This is an attempt to find out the color of anything.

This is still in its infancy stage. Improvements planned for the future include speed optimizations and options.

THE COLOR OF uses an averaging algorithm on the colour pixel values of the queried images, displaying the result incrementally as each picture is loaded. Taking the assumption that random images will average out to become grey, we can attribute any colour bias which deviates from grey, to the term as searched. Any further interpretation is then up to the user.

Kwok Pan currently works for the good people at Newton Circus in Singapore, who kindly support his personal projects. You can visit his website at www.fungkwokpan.com for more information on his works. He also sells his Fluid Vase at www.supabold.com.

Kudos to Max Novakovic (betamax) for his $.getImageData jQuery plugin as well as Gabriel Falcao for his YQL jQuery plugin, making things much easier. And of course, to the developers at YQL and the Flickr community, who shared their resources, making many web applications such as this possible.

Kwok Pan prefers to be contacted via email. Do feel free to email if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions, or if you are interested in commercial uses or collaborative work.

hello [at] thecolorof [dot] com

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 | Created by Fung Kwok Pan