Every designer has a different process in order to create their desired end-product. We primarily focus on form, functionality, and meaning. As a painter, color is my essential tool to explore these fundamentals. I choose colors meticulously when designing so that the piece will look and feel a specific way. Color selection is a subjective process and entails different results depending on who is making the sampling decisions. How is the outcome of an artist's color sampling different from someone with no art or design background?
In order to understand how subjective the process is, I had three different people sample five colors, from images I took, that they felt represented each image as a whole. The images were taken in several different cities from around the world. The first selector is myself, the second is Billy, a mechanical engineer. The third is Jack, a business major.
What I wanted to know was how could we begin to create color palettes objectively? To answer this, I developed a python code to remove the subjective process from color sampling. It is coded to output the five most dominant colors of any image based on pixel count and to represent them proportionally in an information graph. My subjective selections seemingly have more emphasis on hue, while the computer generated selections on value. Using both of these tools for subjective and objective sampling, two different city identities were generated for each location and collected in a book along with documentation of the process.