Color Maps

What color is a CryptoPunk?

ReadFive rules

Balanced Dominant Vivid Light Dark

ExploreAll 10,000 Punks

Approach

Each Punk is represented by one color selected using several different rules. The same rules are applied to all 10,000 Punks so their effects can be compared across the collection.

How to read the maps

Each map contains 10,000 dots arranged in a 100 × 100 grid. One dot represents one Punk. Punks are ordered by token ID, from #0 at the top left to #9999 at the bottom right. Position indicates token order only.

Balanced

Balanced starts with the four non-black colors that occupy the most pixels in a Punk. It then selects the one with the highest vividness score. The score rewards saturation while favoring colors near the middle of the HSL lightness range. If none of the four is sufficiently saturated, Balanced uses the most frequent color instead.

Limiting the choice to the four most-used colors makes small bright details less likely to determine the result. The selected color remains one of the Punk's most frequently used colors, while the vividness score distinguishes between them.

Dominant

Dominant uses area alone. It selects the non-black color that occupies the most pixels in each Punk.

Compared with Balanced, the map is more uniform. Beige, tan and brown tones occupy much of the field, largely because skin tones often make up the largest non-black region of a Punk.

Vivid

Vivid considers the entire non-black palette, regardless of how much area each color occupies. It selects the color with the highest vividness score. If none of the colors is sufficiently saturated, it uses the lightest color.

Because pixel area is ignored, even a very small bright detail can determine the result. An accessory or other small feature may therefore represent the Punk instead of one of its visually larger elements. Saturated accent colors — especially yellow, but also reds, blues and purples — therefore appear much more often than in Balanced or Dominant.

Light

Light ignores area and saturation and selects the non-black color with the highest HSL lightness value in each Punk.

White, cream, pale yellow and light cyan account for much of the map. Looking only at the lightest end of each palette compresses much of the collection into a relatively narrow range of pale tones.

Dark

Dark ignores area and saturation and selects the non-black color with the lowest HSL lightness value in each Punk.

With pure black excluded, dark browns and muted reds account for much of the map. The darkest ends of the palettes appear more varied, with blues, greens and purples still clearly represented.

Across the five rules, the same fixed palette can resolve to substantially different representative colors. A one-color view of a Punk is therefore method-dependent. Balanced is used as the default view in the Ousia Gallery, not as a canonical answer.

Explore

Inspect a Punk

Select a dot on the map or enter a Punk ID to inspect its palette and compare the colors selected by each rule.

Map

Punk

Method, source, limits

PopulationN = 10,000 · complete collection, no sampling

SourceCryptoPunks image data · public on-chain

Unit1 Punk = 1 dot · 24 × 24 px source

OrderToken ID · row-major · 100 × 100

Each Punk is read from its exact 24 × 24 pixel data. Non-black colors are counted by pixel frequency. No resampling, averaging or color clustering is used.

Balanced and Vivid use:

vividness = saturation × (1 − 1.1 × |lightness − 0.55|)

A color is neutral when HSL saturation < 0.12.

Balanced — top 4 non-black colors by pixel count; highest vividness score; neutral fallback: most frequent color.
Vivid — full non-black palette; highest vividness score; neutral fallback: lightest non-black color.
Dominant — highest pixel count.
Light — highest HSL lightness.
Dark — lowest HSL lightness.

Ties are resolved in favor of the more frequently used color.

Pure black appears throughout the collection and frequently serves as outline and internal linework. Including it would make the maps reflect this common structure more strongly than the differences between individual palettes. Black is therefore excluded from all five selection rules in this study.

Reducing a Punk's palette to one color necessarily discards information. Balanced and Vivid rely on a custom HSL-based heuristic, while Light and Dark use HSL lightness, which is not a perceptual measure of brightness.

The 100 × 100 layout follows token ID only. Distance between dots does not indicate visual or chromatic similarity between Punks.

The maps should therefore be read as comparisons between selection methods, not as definitive classifications of a Punk's color.