I always like dynamic color schemes, especially those that change in response to physical environmental variables or user behaviors. Douwe Osinga is doing some nice work thinking about group behaviors to affect the appearance of websites, including Automatic Color Scheme:
The website has its colorscheme centrally stored and it all depends on two variables, the hue of the site and the saturation. The hue is the basic color as taken from the rainbow. The saturation is how full this color is, i.e. how far removed from gray...Now, when a visitor lands on any page, he will get a saturation/hue pair similar to the current one. The longer he stays, the more the current one will be modified in the direction of that particular variation.
I also like his Mapped Web visualizations:
Physical distances are easy enough to measure, but how do we go about measuring psychological distances? The Mapped Web does this by taking the chance that given a page contains the name of one country it will also contain the name of another country as a measure for psychological distance. The resulting images show us how close countries are to each other in psychological terms.
Douwe also has downloadable code for everything I looked at, which I think is really commendable.
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