I really like the idea of iteration 7, but I feel like it would work a lot better with some minimum height on the y axis. Letting it peter out to zero loses the "spectrum-ness" of it, and it just looks like various random color blobs. Maybe could have a fixed minimum height, and somehow use saturation to distinguish "truly zero here" from "really low amount here".
Visually the results are very compelling! It also gives an at-a-glance intuition about the image that the bar-style options fail to convey. I am a fan.
This is a very interesting project. As a design teacher, I recommend to my students that they do not employ color swatches for anything other than flat color designs. Certainly for an animation, a photo or a movie such simplified visualizations have little value as they do not convey the kind of ranges information this project is addressing.
That being said, I am certain that there is no 2D method of visualizing such fundamentally 3D information as color.
This will doubtless be an unpopular comment, but the "Do not" imperative at the bottom of the page was super jarring to me. I really don't appreciate random websites trying to tell me what to do in such a direct imperative tone, and would never write like that even if it were my intention; not to mention that it doesn't actually prevent anything.
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That being said, I am certain that there is no 2D method of visualizing such fundamentally 3D information as color.
Pity, because it was a nice article.