Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 4, 2015

Oranges and Blues

Filed under: Image Understanding,UX,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:19 pm

Oranges and Blues by Edmund Helmer.

From the post:

Title-Fifth-Element

When I launched this site over two years ago, one of my first decisions was to pick a color scheme – it didn’t take long. Anyone who watches enough film becomes quickly used to Hollywood’s taste for oranges and blues, and it’s no question that these represent the default palette of the industry; so I made those the default of BoxOfficeQuant as well. But just how prevalent are the oranges and blues?

Some people have commented and researched how often those colors appear in movies and movie posters, and so I wanted to take it to the next step and look at the colors used in film trailers. Although I’d like to eventually apply this to films themselves, I used trailers because 1) They’re our first window into what a movie will look like, and 2) they’re easy to get (legally). So I’ve downloaded all the trailers available on the-numbers.com, 312 in total – not a complete set, but the selection looks random enough – and I’ve sampled across all the frames of these trailers to extract their Hue, Saturation, and Value. If you’re new to those terms, the chart below should make it clear enough: Hue is the color, Value is the distance from black, (and saturation, not shown, is the color intensity).

Edmund’s data isn’t “big” or “fast” but it is “interesting.” Unfortunately, “interesting” data is one of those categories where I know it when I see it.

I have seen movies and movie trailers but it never occurred to me to inspect the colors used in movie trailers. Turns out to not be a random choice. Great visualizations in this post and a link to further research on genre and colors, etc.

How is this relevant to you? Do you really want to use scary colors for your UI? It’s not really that simple but neither are movie trailers. What makes some capture your attention and stay with you? Others you could not repeat at the end of the next commercial. Personally, I would prefer a UI that captured my attention and that I remembered from the first time I saw it. (Especially if I were selling the product with that UI.)

You?

I first saw this in a tweet by Neil Saunders.

PS: If you are interested in statistics and film, BoxOfficeQuant – Statistics and Film (Edmund’s blog) is a great blog to follow.

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