ICM: Week 1 – Introducing Processing

In this week 1 exercise, my idea was to create a display of “swatches”, showing the color spectrum against a background of either white or black. I also created swatches of either white lines against the background of each color, and a final long series of stripes of white against no color, or black.

The whole thing was created in Processing. For the colors, I used the RGB values. It was a little difficult thinking of where each stripe would go, because I had to navigate using pixels. Pretty much, in the end I thought this was much like creating DIVs in CSS – but, less goofy. I cut and paste a lot, and experiment a bit trying to figure out which coordinates I should change when creating the new rows. The interesting part was that at one point I thought about reversing the colors, and did so in the code. However, since each rectangle’s location is specified by coordinates, the order doesn’t really matter. The order of the background’s does matter, because if it comes last, it would cover up the stripes. I guess the opacity of the backgrounds could be decreased so that some color shines through, but I’m just keeping the colors as they are.

I thought this was pretty fun, and useful perhaps in the future. I’ll give some credit to a fellow student, who suggested that I make the rows thinner than they originally were. Thank you, Nik!

Colored Lines
Week 1, color bars