We, at BBDO, had been working with 3M and Post-it Brand on a larger scale event for their part in being a sponsor of the 2020 Twin Cities Pride Festival. Sadly, then came the COVID-19 pandemic forcing Pride to go virtual, and shortly after that, George Floyd had lost his life and our community was hurting.

3M and our team pivoted on our pivot of a pivot from the original event and came together to create a simple rainbow mural with 7,500 post-it notes and a message to share with the community on the iconic walls of the First Avenue music venue.

I repurposed a simple JavaScript application I created, 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. 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.