A homage to Dopplr, doing something they did first back in 2007 (Week 63)

What you’re supposed to be looking at is the coloured stripe

New tweak: on the company page, see that colour stripe?

It’s an inconsequential decoration detail.

And it’s different on each company page.

We automatically take a screenshot of every company’s homepage and extract their palette.

Like this:

Homepages on the left, extracted palette in the stripe on the right

It’s a small touch, and probably (unless you’ve read this) it will go entirely unnoticed.

But why not.

Credit goes to Dopplr which back in 2007 changed the colour palette in their logo for every city on their site

Dopplr’s blog post about their changing colours can be found in the Internet Archive: In rainbows, authored by the one and only Matt Jones.

(If you want to know more about what Dopplr was — the much missed service for travellers to share their city destinations in order to hang out with friends and more — Matt’s post saying goodbye to Dopplr has lots of pictures.)

Here’s a quote:

We get asked a lot about the colour-coding we give to places in Dopplr: what it represents, why we did it, how are the colours assigned.

One of the main ‘atoms’ of Dopplr is unsurprisingly, place — so to make that run through the warp-and-weft of the user-interface, and our branding, was extremely important.

The Dopplr logo, (or ‘SparkLogo’ as we sometimes like to call it) is the clearest example of this perhaps.

As you add trips to different destinations, Dopplr’s logo becomes your logo, reflecting what you’re doing — right the way through to the ‘favicon‘ that shows up in the address field of most browsers.

Oh they dynamically changed the favicon? Ok we’ll do that too.

👌

In other news we now have codenames like a proper grownup organisation

We now have names for product development milestones. Each milestone is a bundle of semi-related features that roll out more-or-less together, and each milestone is named after a British flowering perennial. The milestone that we’re now working towards is called Aster.

Aster amellus, also known as the European Michaelmas daisy. Image source

The coloured stripes on company pages aren’t part of the Aster milestone.

Aster is a bundle of entirely other stuff, but the previous milestone was a big one including both the new design and also autotags and we needed to take a breather first.

So call it a…

palette cleanser.

😎

–Matt