Case study 01 · 1970–1989
Twenty annual posters designed for Herman Miller’s employee picnic became a dataset for exploring how manual observation and computational analysis reveal different visual properties.
Begin the analysis ↓
Chronology provides the collection’s original order. It shows how the series developed over twenty years, but it does not necessarily reveal which posters are visually related.
1970–1974
1975–1979
1980–1984
1985–1989
To discover those relationships, the posters need to be removed from the timeline and rearranged according to what they look and feel like.
Perceptual sorting · Structure
The posters are arranged from controlled, clearly organized compositions to increasingly dense, irregular, and visually unpredictable structures.
Perceptual sorting · Color temperature
Structure describes how the elements within a poster are organized, but color creates another kind of relationship. The collection was rearranged according to perceived color temperature, moving from warm reds, oranges, and yellows toward cooler blues, greens, and neutral tones.
This arrangement reveals relationships that chronology obscures. Posters created years apart can share a similar compositional logic, while neighboring years can organize information in very different ways. Structure is only one perceptual dimension, however. Color offers another way to reorganize the collection.
Quantitative analysis · 1970
Each poster is translated into measurable color data by grouping its pixels into representative color clusters. The area of each circle corresponds to the number of pixels assigned to that color.
10 representative RGB clusters extracted from 100,000 analyzed pixels. Bubble area corresponds to pixel count. Hover over a bubble for its RGB value and exact count.
Reading the result
Comparing the measured palette with the perceptual warm-to-cool ordering reveals where pixel distribution supports visual judgment and where it does not. A color may occupy relatively little space while still exerting a strong influence through contrast, position, or saturation.