Darren Shaw

I Love Muted Tones

I've collected fashion and portrait images for years. Sometimes for ideas, inspiration or just because I love the pictures but never with the intention of sharing. They're not mine to share and I'm not sure I want to reckon with what my taste in pictures says about me, or what, or who I find beautiful (hello Doutzen). As of today I've collected thousands of images and they've become too tempting not to organise.

I love a restricted colour palette and I save a lot of muted creams, browns and greys. If there is a pop of colour it also tends to be a soft baby blue or pink. It also appears that I have a thing about a white shirt.

I REALLY Love Peter Lindergh's Blacks

Peter Lindbergh is my favourite photographer. The majority of his pictures are black and white, but it's more specfic than that. His pictures are very dark (there's a lot more black than white). If I order my saved pictures by colour palette closest to one of his images (I used the first Robin Wright one) I get lots of other Lindbergh pictures, but also images by other photographers that have the same look. These are the pictures I'll spend the rest of my life trying to replicate.

But I also like a lot of brighter, whiter, black and white pictures. Not all black and whites are the same.

But Not Always

Occassionally I do collect a picture with a bit more colour and saturation. They're often sea blue or hot pink.

Mostly about

is in more of my saved pictures () than anyone else. This might be because she's been working through the whole period that I've been collecting and she tends to do the type of shoots I like. But also... she is beautiful.

I probably prefer pictures of musicians and actresses over models (this is the Lindbergh influence again) but they tend to do fewer shoots. My next one hundred top subjects are: .

Projects Photos

I Love Muted Tones

I've collected fashion and portrait pictures for years. I've got thousands. I have a good sense of what I like but what if I organise them by colour palette and model?

Algorithmic Twombly

My favourite things at the Louvre Abu Dhabi were Cy Twombly's Untitled I-IX paintings. They're structured but chaotic and beautifully imperfect.

Flow-vis for Net-A-Porter

What does a day's trading at Net-A-Porter look like? Taking inspiration from Formula 1's use of flow-vis paint, I came up with a visualisation for a YNAP hackday.

YNAP Hackday Poster

The most significant colours sampled from the product images of the top 1024 clothing products on Net-A-Porter, organised by hue.

Should Have Been Listening to Phoebe Bridgers

Spotify's Wrapped is very shareable but what if it took a longer term view? What if it considered the full thirteen years I've been with Spotify?

My Favourite Net-A-Porter Colour is Black

Net-A-Porter's Spring Summer 2022 marketing campaign, "Go for Bold", centred around a collection of colourful products. Marketing wanted to add a technology element and one idea was to use palettes as a route to finding products. Ultimately this was binned, but I built it anyway.

Has Roger Federer Perspired?

That Roger Federer does not sweat had become ingrained thinking, the sort of idea we were looking to challenge. Was it real or just a lazy cliche? We had IBM’s Wimbledon match data for all the top players and using Weather Underground we pulled in temperature data for those matches. This let us see the number of matches played by player and temperature.

Physical Web and Physical Meetings

As an experiment in using the Physical Web I wanted to create a voting system for physical meetings. A meeting would have a current question and attendees could vote with one click. There would be no entering URLs, downloading apps, or scanning QR codes.

Hello!

I'm Darren Shaw. I'm a software developer at Autotrader. Previously I worked at Zopa, Net-A-Porter and IBM. These are my side projects. Away from work I also play at being a portrait photographer.

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