“I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images (yay wget — “The Social Network” inspired me to not use curl) from a site that has a lot of movie posters online. I then grouped the movie posters by the year in which the movie they promoted was released. For each year, I counted the total number of pixels for each colour in the year. After normalizing and converting to HSL coordinates, I generated the above visualizations.

Check Vijay Pandurangan‘s blog for a very interesting analysis of the distribution of colors in movie posters starting beginning of the 20th century:

Inspirations:

I was inspired by Tyler Neylon’s great work on colour visualizations. I ended up writing my own code to do these image analysis visualizations, but I will try to integrate it with his work.”

Some of Tyler Neylon’s work is below — also great: