BigShinyThing

BigShinyThing reader Daniel — a Swiss graphic design student — writes in to alert us to his site Wear Palettes.

The site features images from the Sartorialist fashion site, from which the dominant colour palettes behind the look have been extracted and catalogued: a daily-growing database of fashion colours.

Nice idea. At the moment the site is bloggish, and we assume Daniel is doing the hard work manually in Photoshop or similar. We’ve no idea where this will go, but can only hope Daniel gets some investment or mainstream interest which would allow him to expand the scope and functionality. It’s easy to imagine Wear Palettes growing to include user-contributed, geo-tagged data from across the globe, and becoming an essential style/design resource. We wish Daniel every success and will be keeping an eye on the Spring palettes to come.

We’re forever banging on about wonderful, world-changing photo-sharing site Flickr. And now people are tinkering with it to create exciting new applications — like this. Go play.

We’ve written before about the power of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), whereby anyone with a modicum of programming ability can hook into API-enabled online resources (Technorati, Skype, Google Maps, Flickr etc) to build their own tools and toys, but we’re still amazed what people come up with.

Link courtesy of Wired.

Rodin explains on his site:

The Pavilion Scores, 2005 - created for performance at the Serpentine Gallery’s 2005 summer pavilion and designed by Alvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Mora, and Cecil Balmond.

I’ve taken the architect’s drawings of the pavilion and turned them into graphic scores, filling in the various rectangle units with colors corresponding to musical notes. These scores will be given to non-musicians who will use them to play children’s glockenspiels that contain colored metal bars of corresponding notes. The colors are related to studies of synesthesia, and are the most common equivalents of color to note.

Synaethesia is the weird perceptual kink du jour — as evidence we offer that rarely an issue of chin-stroky music mag Wire goes by without reference to it at the moment.