Poke-Pie Charts Break Down The Color Palettes Of Your Favorite Pokemon

A redditor algorithmically dissected the color patterns of nearly 500 Pokemon—who would have thought that Ditto is six shades of purple?

by Beckett Mufson

September 3, 2014, 3:30pm

Images courtesy of the artist

The not-so-simple art of Pokemon design requires an incredible amount of creative talent—illustrating iconic creatures derivative of everything from woodland critters to mythical beasts to kitchen appliances (all within a complex elemental system and with a limited number of pixels to work with) is no easy task. With this in mind, graphic designer Jahn Johansen created an algorithm that dissects the mini-rainbow of individual colors that go into each Pokemon image, displaying them in convenient pie chart form.

Some Pokemon, like Charizard, are understandably complex—it's a giant, fire-breathing dragon with green wings, it can have as many colors as it wants. However, as redditor /u/misogichan points out, Pokemon like the seemingly simple gelatinous blob Ditto, are also surprisingly detailed: Ditto is six different shades of purple. This phenomenon is also noted on blogs like Palette Town, which finds the most prominent three to five colors of their subjects and identifies their hexadecimal codes—a dream for aspiring Pokemon Masters who also dabble in graphic design.

Johansen has helpfully published the Poke-Pie Chart crafting algorithm on GitHub, allowing you to create your own Pokemon pie charts if you have the proper coding tools. We hope no one will misguidedly use it to analyze the vastly inferior Digimon.