BBDO MLPS teamed up with 3M Post-it® Brand and Street Factory to honor leaders and activists Rox Anderson, Phillipe Cunningham, and Andrea Jenkins, who have dedicated their lives to empowering the LGBTQIA+ community.

Together we made a 10'x30' mural in the leaders' likeness made entirely of Post-it Notes. To guide the creation process, I built a custom script/tool that took photos and can turn them into a Post-it "blueprint". Then, a team of 10 hand-stuck the 11,000 Post-it Notes that made up the "pixels" of the mural. The installation, located outside of famed music venue First Avenue, was accompanied by a placard including brief bios of each of the community leaders.

I built a simple JavaScript application, so that we could take any image we wanted, and translate it into a grid of the closest visual match in Post-it note colors based on a variety of methods along with options to adjust certain properties like contrast and brightness. It renders out sample images, counts of the number of post-it notes needed for a designated size, and generates a massive vector “color-by-number” grid to use for placement of the notes. It was an adventure in understanding various mathematical color matching techniques, adjusting color brightness and contrast, and normalizing the colors of an image within a grid.