The Colour Wheel hashtag is a great way to create an enduring connection with people around an evolving piece of work based on an emotive subject.

I created this one segment at a time and posted one a day. Each new piece brought an ever increasing amount of replies with suggestions for the next colour, which kept a nice dialogue going over and back with people who follow my work. The public development of the piece helped hook people along for what felt like a little journey, creating a need to see the final piece when it was revealed.

I think the template has a lot of potential for building engagement over an 8 image run. It can be based around a brand, a club, one player in different kits, the potential is quite large. New segments can also be drip fed to create momentum.

Taking Twitter as an example, I posted the first segment, Orange, then when I wanted to post the next, I quote tweeted this original post and placed the updated wheel with the next segment, Yellow. For each new segment I would do this, so the whole project is self-contained in a quote tweet thread, making engagement very easy for users. The colour wheel challenge hashtag was included in each post.

Supplementary work was posted in a reply to the current colour wheel update. Under this I would post the 30 second time lapse video of the artwork creation.

In a separate thread, I would post each individual segment artwork with a colour related pun and the overall challenge hashtag. These images were a neat encapsulation of each piece without the full colour dynamic. Further work could be posted when I revealed the full un-chopped art before it is placed within it’s segment.

If we take all posts that the project generated; the quote tweet full colour wheel images, the individual segment art, the unchopped artwork and the time lapse videos, on Twitter, the project totalled 297 retweets, 3400 likes and 58 bookmarks. Each pieces garnered a large number of suggestion replies. I’ve stopped counting the engagement a few hours after the final images were posted but it’s still steadily rising. I had a similar engagement spike on Instagram.

The time lapse videos plus the final artwork allow for easy creation of video content around the project which can be used for Tiktok, Reels and Youtube shorts.

I measured follower counts too. Over the three days the project took to make, my account was followed by over 270 new people. This type of ongoing, public development of a piece is a nice, easy going way of engaging people around something fun. I’ll be exploring more possibilities in future.