Six colours is the point

The first thing most people assume about a brick mosaic is that more colours would make it better. It is the other way round, and it took me a while to accept that.

When you drop a photo into a grid of 1,024 squares you are not really drawing it. You are deciding where the edges go. Adding colours does not add detail, because the detail was never in the colours. It was in the shapes.

What actually happens with a big palette is that everything goes soft. Two greys that are nearly the same sit beside each other and the boundary between them disappears. From across a room the whole thing turns to mush. A small palette forces hard edges, and hard edges are what your eye reads from four metres away.

The squint test

There is a test for this that takes two seconds. Squint at the design. If you can still tell what it is, it works. If it dissolves, you have too many similar tones, and no amount of extra colours will rescue it.

I do this before anything gets made. It is more reliable than looking properly, because looking properly lets your brain fill in things that are not actually there.

Our own sets make the case

Here is the honest version. I counted the palettes across the whole range. ODY uses six colours. NOM and WIZ use seven. GRIN and VIGIL use eight. LASS uses eleven, which makes it the widest palette we have made.

ODY is the one that reads cleanest from across a room, and it has the fewest colours of anything we sell. Not because I designed it more carefully, but because the constraint did the work for me. LASS is the opposite case. It is bright and it is busy, and it has patches where two neighbouring tones sit close enough that the edge between them softens. You notice that most from a distance, which is exactly where something on a wall gets looked at.

Adding a colour is easy. Earning it is the hard part.

It is cheaper too, which I would rather admit than hide

A set is 1,024 bricks whether it uses six colours or eleven. What changes is everything around them. Every extra colour is another bag to source, another line on the parts list, another thing to count when a kit gets packed. It also splits the same brick count into smaller orders per colour, so the bulk price gets worse on all of them.

So yes, there is a commercial reason to like small palettes and I am not going to pretend there is not. But the order matters. The design gets better first, and the easier packing turns up afterwards as a side effect.

If you are sending us a photo

This is the whole reason we ask for a picture with one clear subject and a strong background. Not because the software cannot cope with a busy photo, but because a busy photo becomes a busy grid, and a busy grid at 1,024 squares is just noise.

Faces work. Animals work even better. A silhouette against a bright sky is close to ideal. A group shot on a cluttered patio taken from six metres away does not, and the preview will show you that before you have committed to anything.