Storyge — Towards a solution👩🎨
Part D of The Immersive Experience Designers Palette Intro
“ All depictions of palettes in the 1500s were of northern European artists, such as in this engraving of Hans Bol. In Bol’s portrait, we see a palette that resembles palettes today with its familiar kidney bean shape, thumbhole and indent allowing the artist to hold brushes in the same hand holding the palette. It appears that pure colors are placed all over the palette.” *1
In order to determine how to design an Immersive Experience Design palette board, I propose we look at what makes the palette board’s design so amazing.
Did you know that the palette board has barely changed design since its invention in the mid 1500's.
In order to determine what makes the design of the palette board so great I will break our investigation up in 2 parts:
1. Function
2. Physical Design
1. The Function of the Painter’s Palette Board:
“Saint Luke uses a small and limited palette for painting the blue cloak of the Virgin. A major part of the palette is covered by a limited set of colors. The setting of the palette with colors on the edge, and a large bare area is an indication of mixing. In the background of the painting, his assistant prepares a more extensive palette of colors, perhaps one for painting flesh, arranged in tonal value from white to black.”*1
So here we see that on the painting palette board you have:
- “A limited set of colors,” to help you focus on a specific area in the painting;
- “A large bare area” for mixing, helping you test and compare colours before applying them to the canvas;
- “Colors, arranged in tonal value,” making it possible for you to prioritize and keep concentrating on the application of your skills.
So now, in order to apply these functions to the Immersive Experience Design world we need to determine what ‘colours’ mean in the Immersive Experience Design context.
So, if colours are what painters use to populate a canvas, then let’s figure out what us Immersive Experience Designers use to populate our Extended Reality (XR) Canvas.
The Extended Reality canvas can be populated by a combination of any or all of the following digital formats:
- 360 Videos
- 360 Images
- 3D Assets
- 2D Video clips
- 2D Images
- 2D Graphic elements, including Text
- Stereo, Mono and Spatial Audio clips
- Interactive Components
For us, the function of Storyge would be to:
- Achieve the Experience Goal
- Create harmony within the immersive composition
- Explore and experiment with different arrangements
- Access previous arrangements
- Organize elements within the immersive environment
Great, so now that we got the usability sorted, let’s get on to seeing what makes the painters palette’s physical design so amazing.
2. Physical Design
“A palette enables you to have your colors (and brushes) at an ergonomic working height and it’s instantly accessible when you want to pick up a color or mix a color, whether you’re standing in front of your painting or viewing it from a distance.”*3
What makes the palette board’s design so amazing is that it allows you to have:
- your colours and brushes at accessible and ergonomic working height
- your colours and brushes accessible instantly
- a clean area to mix colours in
So now, knowing what our colours are, we can go ahead and apply these physical design characteristics to our context —
For Storyge’s interface we need —
- our digital files accessible via an intuitive and ergonomic design interface
- our digital files instantly accessible (when needed)
- a clean area within the interface to temporarily mix and merge digital files
Ultimately it’s about having a quick way of expressing your visual thoughts and then also experimenting with a fraction of your resources rather than wasting all of your resources on developing something that you might not want to keep.
