Stripes: Stylish Color Rotations
STRIPES: FASHION patterns are inspired by real world designer handbags and clothes.
STRIPES: RETRO patterns are inspired by real products from the 60’s and 70’s.
The Starting Idea for “Stripes”
“Stripes” originated from a recent OnSwitch user email – Darryl Peddle wrote:
(Here’s a) set idea that might be popular...Stripes! Basically the color wheel with white mixed in as a pair…. Sometimes the colors can be a little too dark on their own... this would give a nice alternative. It is already ‘kinda’ there for sports team ones... but i think this would be a good one!
There are three things that stood out in Darryl’s request:
His appreciation for simple color rotations, moving the same set of colors in fixed order around on your lights. The OnSwitch Team, is often stretching for the next dazzling animation so it’s easy for us to overlook the elegance of rotations— our first (and most basic) animation type.
His recognition that Hue’s pure colors are dimmer than its color temperatures (shades of white).
The proposed name “Stripes” — which appealed to us because the name tells you so much about what it should do: create a striped pattern and move that around your bulbs.
Stripes: Retro Final Set
Let’s look at the RETRO scenes as they were our first attempt to capture Darryl’s idea. The basic visual choices, animation ordering and transition speeds formed the basis for our follow on FASHION album.
Using Darryl’s suggestion as a starting point we took a deeper dive into striped patterns:
what patterns should we select.
how we should we name them
how should they look on screen inside the app.
how should they animate to give the most “stripey” vibe we can deliver.
The White Stripes
We decided to have varying levels of “white” mixed into the color order so that you could enjoy “Stripes” in several different ways. We went with a RETRO theme for this set rather than just plugging in colors of the rainbow. We also left open the strong possibility there will be Stripes sequel albums with a variety of different themes holding future sets together.
NOTE: On the FASHION album we did not to restrict ourselves to the same white stripe rules so we could just pick the best patterns we could find.
The Color Order is What You See!
One thing you’ll notice above is we show the colors and the order rather than a picture of a Beach Towel for example. That’s because the colors and color order are so fundamental to color rotations. We wanted you guys to clearly know the striped pattern and see it appear that way on your bulbs!
Prepare Your Lights for Stripes!
To see the striped patterns animate on your bulbs: Your bulbs need to be listed in the Hue App (aka on the Bridge) in the same order they appear in your room! To change this order, go into the Philips Hue app, go to SETTINGS then tap LIGHT SETUP. Scroll down to the room you want to rearrange and you can tap-hold-drag any light up or down to change the order.
Use the Philips Hue Official App to set the order of your lights as they appear in your room!
Inspirations for Retro
When we started looking at Striped patterns using Google search, we quickly realized there are so many great patterns we could do that we had to narrow it down to some kind of a smaller set that makes sense. Otherwise the set would be random with nothing tying the members of the set to a unifying theme other than Stripes. We noticed that lots of “retro” stripe patterns from the 60’s and 70’s looked cool. With all those good choices we decided to use that as our “filter” for picking patterns. We were inspired by both real world objects and just abstract patterns swatches that we saw. Here’s a sample of some of the pattern inspirations for the final set.
Color Rotations (and How We Keep It Stripey!)
Here’s what a color rotation does on your bulbs. In the following example there are three bulbs that are going to rotate the colors Red-White-Blue. This example also assumes your bulbs are arranged physically in the same order they are on the Hue Bridge. (See next section for information how to change your bulb order on the Hue Bridge.)
While the order the colors move makes intuitive sense, there’s an unexpected breaking up of the “Red-white-blue” pattern as you go. Your brain would like to see white between the red and the blue at all times.
We wanted our new Stripes album to look like stripes on your bulbs at all times. So for patterns with white in them, we added an additional white entry beyond what is shown in the Scene thumbnail. This keeps the color white between other richer colors. Here’s an example of this for the 5 colors in the Spring Jacket scene.
In the example above your bulbs will always have a color-white-color-white repeating pattern assuming your lights are arranged in the same sequence as the scene — see next section for how to do this.