Colourstory is an app and a website which enables people to create beautiful design products using colour extracted from their existing social media content or photo albums.

In essence Colourstory offers digital and physical products that reflect the colour palettes unique to each person’s life by analysing their images. When colour is treated as a form of data, patterns emerge that are a unique signature of the source images. Currently this signature, which we call a ‘Colourstory’ traverses the boundary between artwork and data visualisation. 

As artwork, our process produces aesthetically pleasing results. If the viewer is tempted to delve deeper, the Colourstory offers fresh insight and reinterpretation of its subject matter, be it a wedding, a changing landscape or the first year of a child’s life. The insight and fresh perspectives offered make education and research attractive markets for further exploration, for example in areas such as art history or as a tool for exploring images in an educational setting.The genesis of Colourstory is in founder Arthur Buxton’s colour trend visualisation artworks.

Spurred on by encouraging sales, he wanted to open up his method to a wider audience, in a sense crowd-sourcing his artwork.

While the creation of digital applications is the main focus of Colourstory's work, its genesis as a company lies in print. The start-up emerged from a research partnership between Arthur and fine-art print publisher Dr Paul Laidler of UWE. We use print as a way of encouraging users to create beautiful Colourstories – artworks they would proudly frame and display above the mantelpiece or send as postcards.

The Colourstory team consists of Arthur Buxton (Founder and Creative Director), Seth Jackson (Commercial Director) and Charlotte Smith (Marketing and Research Intern).