Inspiration Mondays: thecolorof.com

Recently on Google+, +Marsha Kwong shared a site called thecolorof.com which is a site that attempts to figure out, well... the colour of things. It does this thusly: You enter a word, any word, a thing, a place, a smell, an emotion... and it gathers up images on the web that have been labelled with that word. Then, it lays one on top of the other until you get a mixture of all the colours from those images. Since people have labelled these images with that word, the resulting mixture of colours will therefore help to describe that word.

Tonight, I thought I'd play around with it. Here's the colour of cake... which looks like a strawberry spongecake to me:

And here's cotton candy. Sure looks like cotton candy to me, including the blue kind:

Then, I thought, "I wonder what the colour of sheep is?" And it looks like sheep off in a distance in a meadow:

Then, I wondered what the colour of "goat" was, and it's slightly muddier... more hoof and less fluff:

And "horse" was more... western to me. Kind of like the rolling hills just off the plains, like a ranch:

The colour of "jazz" was scintillating and exotic:

And the colour of "serenity" made me think of dusk on a summer's evening:

And what about "love?" Well... it looked like a mixture of cotton candy, cake, sheep, and a little touch of serenity. And well, why wouldn't it?

I think it's a great way for someone who works with colours to play around with how these colours invoke emotion and memories. I've searched for the colours of cities, towns, toys, childhood... and yeah, they're mostly spot on. Indie dyers of yarn, here's a good place to come up with some colourway names. Designers, here's a good place for a colour palette to match the mood you're after.

And for me? Well, for a dreamer like me, it's a good place just to come and add colour to my daydreams. Ah... daydreams... always in colour...