The Colour of Cities

July 26th, 2011

I came across The Color Of this weekend via Brendan Crain’s Where blog.

The site queries and aggregates image data from Flickr,to find out the colour of anything. It uses an averaging algorithm on the colour pixel values of the queried images, displaying the result incrementally as each picture is loaded. Based on the assumption that random images will average out to become grey, any colour bias which deviates from grey is attributed to the search term.

While The Color Of can be used with any subject matter, I was—of course—drawn to cities.  I’ve noticed that various cities each have a unique colour palette that contributes to it’s underlying urban terroir. Here are the results for some of my reader’s (i.e. your) hometowns:

Color of Kansas City

Color of Seattle

Colour of Toronto

5 thoughts on “The Colour of Cities

  1. I love it. I put some of the East Valley cities together with Arizona here on my Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcrummey/5980654638/in/photostream/

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