If you’ve read very many of my other blog posts you might know by now that I love the idea of translating one medium into another. Audio to visual and visual to audio, incorporating text into imagery, and in this case figuring out the color palette of a word. I used the PhotoChrome website to make the background of this image, and I pulled one of the images it used to make the background into a separate layer and gave it a little more opacity.

I thought it was interesting how the website interpreted my search term. Photochrome pulls images from Unsplash that fit a theme. The term I chose was a bit vague , with several different meanings, and several of those meanings are represented. Can you guess what the term was?

It was control!

The image contains a remote control, some control panels, people being controlled by some force, and of course, the mannequin strung up and made to dance.

I saw The Color of Words assignment elsewhere, so I thought I’d take a look at it. I used joy as my keyword, in true Bob fashion, and the above image is what I got. One of the images in the mix featured the word prominently, so you can see it in the middle. You can also faintly see a person with a big smile in the middle. Some of the images the system picked had happy colors, but most used a muted palette, so the image is pretty muddy.

I’m kinda glad the assignment only has a star and a half, which is probably one star too many for the effort it took. But I really have to question how this is considered design at all. I see design as a deliberate decision making process to achieve a desired end, and this is lacking in both decisions and goals.

I played with the interface a bit – removing some images, sizing and cropping others, and came up with something  a little more… something. The colors speak a little more, and the contents are a little more intelligible. It is possible that this could be used in a design to express washed-out joy and faded happiness, nearly forgotten memories of better times.

Can you guess the word that I put into PhotoChrome? I integrated a picture of that word somewhere into the picture that PhotoChrome generated.