How to turn text into colors (without AI)

You definitely know that you can generate an image from text by simply feeding the prompt to Nano Banana or an equivalent. What if I tell you that you can generate a color palette out of your text, without any help from AI?

My idea is nothing complex. Just look at the HSL color model.

As you can see, to represent color, we need three numbers - hue degrees, saturation percentages, and lightness percentages. All we have to do is get those numbers out of text.
There are a few ways to do so, but one of the most common, logical, and foolproof is to create an alphabet first and then analyze character frequency second. Let me show you.
For starters, we need a text. I took Christmas from Lingua.com. If we ran character frequency analysis (as is), we would end up with something like this:

[
  {"character": " ", "count": 307},
  {"character": "e", "count": 195},
  {"character": "a", "count": 137},
  {"character": "t", "count": 134},
  {"character": "i", "count": 120},
  {"character": "s", "count": 115},
  {"character": "o", "count": 97},
  {"character": "h", "count": 94},
  {"character": "r", "count": 92},
  {"character": "n", "count": 91},
  {"character": "l", "count": 86},
  {"character": "d", "count": 79},
  {"character": "c", "count": 49},
  {"character": "m", "count": 43},
  {"character": "y", "count": 39},
  {"character": "p", "count": 35},
  {"character": ",", "count": 31},
  {"character": "g", "count": 28},
  {"character": "f", "count": 27},
  {"character": "u", "count": 21},
  {"character": "b", "count": 20},
  {"character": "w", "count": 20},
  {"character": "v", "count": 11},
  {"character": "C", "count": 10},
  {"character": ".", "count": 9},
  {"character": "S", "count": 7},
  {"character": "k", "count": 7},
  {"character": "-", "count": 6},
  {"character": "A", "count": 5},
  {"character": "(", "count": 5},
  {"character": ")", "count": 5},
  {"character": "'", "count": 5},
  {"character": "\n", "count": 4},
  {"character": "j", "count": 4},
  {"character": "J", "count": 3},
  {"character": "T", "count": 2},
  {"character": "N", "count": 2},
  {"character": "x", "count": 2},
  {"character": "G", "count": 2},
  {"character": "L", "count": 2},
  {"character": "\"", "count": 2},
  {"character": "B", "count": 2},
  {"character": "U", "count": 1},
  {"character": "2", "count": 1},
  {"character": "5", "count": 1},
  {"character": "D", "count": 1},
  {"character": "P", "count": 1},
  {"character": "q", "count": 1},
  {"character": "/", "count": 1}
]

Unsurprisingly, the whitespace is the most frequent symbol - it's a common thing for texts in the English language and other Western languages. If we were to process letters only (case-insensitive), the array would look like this:

[
  { "character": "e", "count": 195 },
  { "character": "a", "count": 142 },
  { "character": "t", "count": 136 },
  { "character": "s", "count": 122 },
  { "character": "i", "count": 120 },
  { "character": "o", "count": 97 },
  { "character": "h", "count": 94 },
  { "character": "n", "count": 93 },
  { "character": "r", "count": 92 },
  { "character": "l", "count": 88 },
  { "character": "d", "count": 80 },
  { "character": "c", "count": 59 },
  { "character": "m", "count": 43 },
  { "character": "y", "count": 39 },
  { "character": "p", "count": 36 },
  { "character": "g", "count": 30 },
  { "character": "f", "count": 27 },
  { "character": "b", "count": 22 },
  { "character": "u", "count": 22 },
  { "character": "w", "count": 20 },
  { "character": "v", "count": 11 },
  { "character": "j", "count": 7 },
  { "character": "k", "count": 7 },
  { "character": "x", "count": 2 },
  { "character": "q", "count": 1 }
]

Our next task is to take the HSL color wheel

Form a "string" out of symbols and "wrap" it around the wheel

By dividing the wheel into equal parts according to our "alphabet," we got the hues. The frequency of symbols got us saturation. And luminosity has a default value - 50% for pure colors. Of course, nothing stops you from making luminosity a variable.

All right, let's go to code:

First step, cleaning up and normalising text data according to our preferences - include or not whitespaces, numbers, etc.

    let rawChars = text.split('');

    const filteredChars = rawChars.filter(char => {

        // any whitespace
        const isSpace = /\p{Separator}/u.test(char);

        // punctuation in any script
        const isPunct = /\p{P}/u.test(char);

        // any numeric digit in any language
        const isDigit = /\p{N}/u.test(char);

        // any letter
        const isLetter = /\p{L}/u.test(char);

        // any symbol
        const isSymbol = /\p{S}/u.test(char);

        if (!settings.includeWhitespace && isSpace) return false;
        if (!settings.includePunctuation && isPunct) return false;
        if (!settings.includeDigits && isDigit) return false;
        if (!settings.includeSymbols && isSymbol) return false;
        return true;
    });

    const workingText = filteredChars.join('');

Second is making a frequency table

  const charMap = {};
  filteredChars.forEach(char => {
      const key = settings.caseSensitive ? char : char.toLowerCase();
      charMap[key] = (charMap[key] || 0) + 1;
  });

Next is making auxiliary processing

  let minCodePoint = Infinity;
  let maxCodePoint = -Infinity;
  let maxFreq = 0;

  const data = entries.map(([char, count]) => {
    const preparedChar = settings.caseSensitive ? char : char.toLowerCase();
    const codepoint = preparedChar.codePointAt(0);
    if (codepoint < minCodePoint) minCodePoint = codepoint;
    if (codepoint > maxCodePoint) maxCodePoint = codepoint;
    if (count > maxFreq) maxFreq = count;
    return { char, count, codepoint };
  });

  return { 
    data, 
    minCodePoint, 
    maxCodePoint, 
    maxFreq, 
    range: (maxCodePoint - minCodePoint) || 1 
  };

Finally, HSL calculations

export const getPalette = (context) => {
  if (!context) return [];

  return context.data.map(({ char, count, codepoint }) => {
    const h = Math.round(((codepoint - context.minCodePoint) / context.range) * 360);
    const s = Math.round((count / context.maxFreq) * 100);
    const l = 50;

    return {
      char,
      count,
      h, s, l,
      hsl: `hsl(${h}, ${s}%, ${l}%)`
    };
  });
};

Anyway, let's see what the palette for our Christmas text will look like. I made two types of data visualization for that - Tile Chart and Bar Chart.

A lot of interesting stuff is going on here. We can go the full naive approach, collect all the highest-scoring colors, and call it a day.

But here is the problem - it's way too "loud", too vivid and intense to be a useful color palette.

One way to overcome it will be to use the weighted clustering algorithm. Long story short:
1) we split the 360° color wheel into 30° sectors (buckets), since the standard color wheel has 12 colors, and 360/12 is 30.
2) we push each color into the corresponding bucket
3) we calculate the weight of each bucket (high saturation is high weight)
4) we calculate an average hue and average saturation for the sum of colors in each bucket
5) ???
6) PROFIT (there are no guarantees it will make a suitable palette, though, so proceed with caution)

Straight to the code:

export default function getWeightedClusters(palette: PaletteItem[]): ColorCluster[] {
    const buckets: Bucket[] = Array.from({ length: 12 }, () => ({
      totalWeight: 0,
      sumX: 0,
      sumY: 0,
      count: 0,
      originalColors: []
    }));

    palette.forEach(item => {
      // 1. Parse HSL
      const {h, s, l, char} = item;

      // 2. Calculate Weight (Favor high saturation)
      const weight = Math.pow(s, 2) + 1; // +1 to give very desaturated colors a tiny vote

      // 3. Determine Bucket (0-11)
      // We shift by 15 degrees so the primary colors are in the center of buckets
      const bucketIndex = Math.floor(((h + 15) % 360) / 30);

      // 4. Convert Hue to Vector (Radians)
      const rad = (h * Math.PI) / 180;
      const x = Math.cos(rad) * weight;
      const y = Math.sin(rad) * weight;

      // 5. Accumulate
      const b = buckets[bucketIndex];
      b.totalWeight += weight;
      b.sumX += x;
      b.sumY += y;
      b.count++;
      b.originalColors.push({ h, s, l, weight, char });
    });

    // 6. Finalize Clusters
    return buckets
      .map((b, index) => {
        if (b.count === 0) return null;

        // Convert vector average back to Hue
        let avgHue = (Math.atan2(b.sumY, b.sumX) * 180) / Math.PI;
        if (avgHue < 0) avgHue += 360;

        // Weighted average Saturation
        const avgSat = b.originalColors.reduce((acc, c) => acc + (c.s * c.weight), 0) / b.totalWeight;

        const bucketChars = b.originalColors.map(item => {return {char: item.char, color: `hsl(${item.h}, ${item.s}%, 50%)`}});

        return {
          id: index,
          representativeHue: Math.round(avgHue),
          representativeSat: Math.round(avgSat),
          strength: b.totalWeight,
          density: b.count,
          chars: bucketChars
        } as ColorCluster;
      })
      .filter((c): c is ColorCluster => c !== null);
  }

And visualization (I've made a color wheel and pack of cards):

Cool, huh? But it works not only with Latin alphabet-based languages, but (theoretically) supports everything.

Here is text in Japanese I took from this site, Reading Passage 3

That's actually only a small part of what could be done. We can calculate the average hue and saturation of the text and generate a palette from just one color, for example.

You can look at the code here
You can look and play with the tool here

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Feel free to reach me in comments or anywhere.

P.S. The cover image was created using a color palette derived from this post. R is for recursion.

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