A Puzzle That Runs the Gamut

December 22, 2014 |

A favorite pastime of many, during the holiday season and throughout the year, is assembling jigsaw puzzles. Children around the world usually start with an elementary 24-piece puzzle, and graduate to more advanced puzzles containing many more pieces. Australian artist/illustrator/designer Clemens Habicht has created perhaps one of the most difficult (and beautiful) puzzles we’ve ever seen. Even we as designers, who have a bit of an edge given our intimate knowledge in the nuances of color, see this is quite daunting. Rather than recreating an image, this puzzle requires you to assemble the pieces based on a CMYK color gamut. That’s right, a 1,000-piece puzzle made up of simple 1,000 different colored pieces. In his own words, Habicht discusses: “The idea came from enjoying the subtle differences in the blue of a sky in a particularly brutal jigsaw puzzle, I found that without the presence of image detail to help locate a piece I was relying only on an intuitive sense of color, and this was much more satisfying to do than the areas with image details. What is strange is that unlike ordinary puzzles where you are in effect redrawing a specific picture from a reference you have a sense of where every piece belongs compared to every other piece. There is a real logic in the doing that is weirdly soothing, therapeutic, it must be the German coming out in me. As each piece clicks perfectly into place, just so, it’s a little win, like a little pat on the back.” Sweet satisfaction, indeed. If/when we tackle this, we will be sure to post the result!

Via Tumblr and lamingtondrive.com