Asemica

Color

These are all the colors Asemica uses, but you will never see them all together like this. Each background color has a list of which colors are not allowed on top, as described by the below chart. This process gives us the control we need to avoid bad color combinations, while leaving room for endless surprise.

It was helpful in designing Asemica to visualize or sketch every idea we considered. We can assign probabilities and look at individual outputs forever, but until we see a big group of results at once, it's impossible to determine what the right balances are. This manual visualization of background color ratios gave us the probability numbers we needed for the algorithm.

Part of our color process was to place every single color on top of every single color. That helped us define which colors should be background colors, remove bad pairings, and remove certain colors entirely.

In some places, we wanted subtle shifts in color – the ecru, trace, and yellowed background colors each have a different feel. But those same three colors as characters on black look too similar. Using more than one of these at a time risks looking like a mistake, so for each background color, we pick just one option to be canonical.

PICKING COLORS
Single Character Gridded Compositions

One of the ways we add variety is by determining whether repeated characters get colored before repetition, or after. In gridded character compositions where the same character repeats, we can color before repetition by element, before repetition by character, after repetition by element, or after repetition by character.

A similar method is used in other composition types that get gridded (like Patterns and Lines of Text) to break the monotony of the patterns and strengthen compositions using color.

Color by line
*Lines of Text compositions*

Non-gridded patterns almost always have colors chosen after repetition, to break up the monotony of the pattern and introduce surprise.

Gridded Patterns always get color chosen by element, before repetition, so that each module shows a clear pattern to constrast all the different ways the same pattern can change with different coloration.

Lines of Text can have elements or characters chosen by color, but most often Lines of Text are colored by line.

Similar to gridded Patterns,the same set of characters is repeated, but in different arrangements and different colors, as if a study in all the possible ways to lay out this information.

Each composition gets randomly assigned a number of colors that are allowed, from 1 to 6. And each individual color has a wide range of likelihood. For example, black is much more likely to appear than yellow. So if a composition uses only black and yellow, black is much more likely to appear per element, within that composition.

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