History of Crayola Colors

Iron Viz entry #2

If you’ve been on Facebook recently, I’m sure you’ve witnessed the popularity of crayon art.  This is art created by melting crayons onto a canvas.  My younger sister joined the trend and has created some cool pieces of her own, showcased below:

I found a List of Crayola crayon colors while looking through Wikipedia’s List of Lists of Lists.  The variety of colors that have been introduced over the years is incredible.  After seeing this, I knew that I had to build a viz with it.  What made it fun was that this data absolutely required the use of lots of colors – something that’s rarely recommended in dashboards.  Using crayon art as inspiration, I decided to focus this viz on the variety of colors that have been introduced and retired over the years.

This dashboard required a couple of unique techniques.  The first was building a custom color palette.  If you’re not familiar with custom palettes, Tableau provides a great article explaining how to Create Custom Color Palettes.  Since there were 151 colors, in order to make assigning them seamless, I sorted the colors alphabetically and then used Excel to create the XML tags around each color’s hex values before copy/pasting them into the Preferences.tps file.  Tip:  Excel makes a great companion when you’re creating really long calculations.  Now that I had my custom colors assigned, I wanted to find a way to sort it into a gradient of like colors.  What I found is that it’s pretty tough to sort hex colors into a rainbow-like gradient.  I did find a great article, Grouping Hex Colorsby Hue, detailing the best way to sort hex using HSL and HSV.  This method isn’t perfect but it does provide a good enough gradient that makes the color trends stand out better.  The other unique technique I used was for the crayon color change effect.  That was achieved through the use of a transparent image floated over a bar chart.  The crayon image was created in PowerPoint.

Enjoy the viz and make sure to click around to learn more about each color.