Choice of tile colors
March 23rd, 2006 in The Making of TheBroth · By Markus WeichselbaumWith TheBroth, everyone can open their own room. Upon doing so, the room owner has the option to show the global mosaic in their room, or to create a unique mosaic that takes place exclusively in their room. For the latter, the room owner has the option to select the tile colors by uploading an image that is used to define the tile colors.
As developers of TheBroth, the public room with the global mosaic is basically “our” room (technically, it really is no different from any other room), and we had to make a decision which tile colors to use.
Needless to say, it wasn’t an easy decision, and our experiments revealed some interesting aspects on the psychology of colors - the tile colors influence artists’ behavior!
The effect of saturated “kiddie” colors
Initially we experimented with random colors, providing a gamut of colors that spreads over the entire spectrum. This provided for a very colorful effect, with many tiles showing very saturated colors.
Interestingly, when we had this wide range of different colors, we observed that instead of collaborating to create one large artwork, mosaic participants started to make their own little creations, in oblivion to everyone else’s efforts!
The artworks were typically small, made out of 50 to 100 brightly colored tiles. Invariably the same objects were created: Trees, sailboats, fishes, faces, stick figures, cars, flowers, ocean waves, and spelling out words.
Moral of the story? Bright and colorful tiles with a wide range of colors seem to turn every TheBroth visitor into a 5-year old, at least judging by the artistic merit of their creations!
If that wasn’t enough, the apparent paucity of colors of a certain kind made people rather protective of their tiles and “karma” fights ensued, where one person would steal another person’s precious tile. That person would then berate the thief with a “-” vote, who would then swiftly reciprocate. Small battles broke out, rampant with destructive behaviour and vindictive Karma voting.
Learnings from the gallery
Examining the gallery, in particular snapshots from custom rooms, we noticed that the less colors had been available in a room, the more artistic and expansive were the artworks!
So we tested the hypothesis that mosaics with tiles of limited color range and desaturated colors…
- produce more expansive artworks
- increase collaborative behaviour
Our experiments so far seem to indicate that the hypothesis is correct!
Thus, we decided to release TheBroth using a terracotta-like set of tile colors.
On the right hand side you can see the original JPEG image we used to define the public, global mosaic (or at least that’s the image we used shortly before the launch of TheBroth)!
As you can see, we added specks of color as we fine-tuned the distribution of colors!
