Colour Swatch Print of Every UK Bird – A Truly Original Concept

This is cool.

As described  in Caught by the River‘s competition post, to win a free print, from Friday 19th May.

‘Despite looking through countless bird guides, photographer and designer Pedr Browne couldn’t find anything that gave an overview of their most basic visual characteristic – their colours. And so he embarked on a mission to capture those colours, resulting in his beautiful ‘Birdswatch’ print, which feature a colour swatch for every bird found in the UK.’

The creator describes the process as follows. 

‘The design was created using a series of hand-built programmes that downloaded and analysed images of birds. The process involved four stages:

1. I wrote a programme to download an image of every bird featured in the RSPB’s online bird guide along with their name and latin name.
2. I digitally extracted each bird from its background to make sure the background colour didn’t effect the next step.
3. I wrote another programme that used a web API to perform a statistical analysis of the colours within each image, resulting in a set of the seven most common colours from the image for every bird.
4. I wrote another programme that took the colours, laid them out and created a print-ready PDF along with a second PDF containing the bird names.’

A truly original concept. The prints can be ordered from https://www.etsy.com/…/birdswatch-great-british-bird-colour…