We created a histogram of all of the images that have appeared on the front page of carleton.edu, plotting the saturation of the image against the year.
With 250 being the highest level of saturation, we noticed that the majority of the images are below 125. In other words, pretty low in saturation. Considering just how many are in the bottom portion of the graph, it seems like it has been a conscious decision by Carleton to use images of lower saturation. This seemed odd at first, but after some online digging, we found a possible reason behind it.
Some say that pictures of lower saturation can feel more personal and convey the emotion of the content better, as opposed to fully-saturated pictures. Since most of the pictures (at least the most recent ones) show scenes of students having fun or friendly faculty-student interactions, we think that Carleton could be trying to convey these happy moments to prospective students by slightly de-saturating the images. Something so subtle like changing the tone of an image could help convey the sense of the tight-knit Carleton community to the viewers of carleton.edu.
