The Colorful Personality Project

This is an introduction to an art project I plan to pursue in the next few months (thanks to kai for inspiration). The basic idea is to associate good friends with colors and use those colors in various ways in various artworks. [Note: Sorry to friends who weren't included in this- I've tried to include just those who I feel I know enough to judge their personalities- which probably means you should take me out to dinner more often.]

So how are the colors calculated you ask? I simply map the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator with the CYMK color model. If you are not familiar with the Myers-Briggs indicator, essentially personality types are broken down into four dichotomies: Extravert/Introvert, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, Perceiving/Judging. I map which preferences I think you are (from 0% to 100%) to the CYMK color value (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta, Black).

The process by which I assigned these values may not strictly follow the actual Myers-Briggs Indicator since I tried to simplify each dichotomy into a question which I compulsively answered for each person without thinking too much into the question (in hope to be more "honest" with my assignments). The questions I asked for each pair were approximately as follows:

1. Extravert/Introvert: At a party, do you start the conversation, or do you wait for others to
2. Sensing/Intuition: In TV series Lost, would you be Jack Shephard or John Locke (sorry for those who haven't seen Lost)
3. Thinking/Feeling: Do you despise romantic comedies, or do you outwardly or secretly love them
4. Perceiving/Judging: Do you prefer to take things as they come or plan ahead
   

Here are the results in the form of color and your initials (the photoshop savvy can probably reverse-engineer your scores - Edit: see update 1).



I did a bit of analysis just for kicks to see if there were any glaring patterns in my friends. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the personalities are pretty balanced, with the exception of the first dichotomy, which is significantly more extroverts than introverts (which makes sense, since I am an introvert, creating a chicken-egg dilemma with other introverts). There are also a bit more judgers than perceivers- otherwise, the other two are pretty balanced.

I broke the results up into various segments such as female/male, old/new (pre-college, post-high school), lived with/ didn't live with, platonic/crush+ (crush+ = anywhere between had a small crush on to had a relationship with- don't bother trying to reverse-engineer this, you'll get nowhere), and just for fun, Mac vs PC. As you can see once again, the segments are pretty balanced usually resulting in a dark-pinkish-grayish color.



This is likely more interesting to me than it is to you, which is why I'd recommend you try it for yourself with your friends- you might be surprised by the results!

Update: Since the color mode is automatically converted when I save as a jpg or gif, I cannot post an accurate color model. If you really want to know, download the photoshop file here: http://brianfoo.com/projects/cymk/cymk.psd. Make sure you're in CYMK color mode... to test its accuracy, my color is [92,18,27,75]. Unlike past interpretations of you, I am willing to give anyone explanations of your scores if you ask. Generally, the more blue you are, the more introverted you are (red being more extroverted). If you are more feeling, you will become pinker if you are extroverted and more violet if you are introverted. If you are more intuition, your color will become more dull if you are violet, and more orange-y if you red/pink-ish. Darker is more judging, and lighter is perceiving.

Update 2: I accidently reversed the judging/perceiving pair... I've updated the post to reflect the fix- everything should now be accurate