HexSampler.com a Hexday extension

I’ve pushed out the first pass and very alpha state version of hexsampler, this is a new section on hexday that is more concerned with sampling colors from other locations than picking your hex color for the day.

Currently if you are a signed up and logged in user, you get access to a bookmarklet that you can drag to your Firefox or Safari browser bar. Then if you find yourself on a webpage with an image with some interesting colors, click the bookmarklet and it will make all the images “clickable” You’ll get some “Hex Sample This” text. Clicking will open a new window or tab in your browser, the image, it’s location and the pages title are passed to hexday’s hexsampler whereupon the system calculates the average color palette for the image, records it and displays it ready for you to click thru and choose those colors as your hexday.

A note on the palette algorithm. There is no sure fire way to auto generate a palette from an image that matches exactly what you will expect. Every person will see different prominent colors based on their likes and their eyes. So we’ve tried to make the color palette creation simple. Imagine the image is broken down into a grid (at the moment it is 5 wide by proportional height. The colors that appear in each section of the grid are “averaged” these grid areas then make up the palette for that image.

This is just the first pass as sampling images and colors online, there is a long list of additional approaches I’d like to look at, if only there was more time, as a sneak peek into how I’m thinking:

• website sampling (parse all the css for colors that make up a site)
• manual image sampling using a color picker like in photoshop
• Assisted image sampling, combination of what we have now and manual allowing for human tweaking
• HexSampler wordpress plugin to automate the process for any images embedded in a blog post or hex colors mentioned in the text (a manual example of this can be seen on my Pantone Mug post
• Other means of getting images into the system including (web based upload, feeds and email input).

The last point, although possibly the hardest and least likely is the most exciting for me, I’d love to have an iPhone app where I could take a picture, press a few buttons and get back a palette that I can then use (for picking my hexday color for example). I often pick my colors based on things I can see at the time, it would be awesome to be able to actually make the pick based on what i actually could see and take a photo of.