The Vox Media team developed an inclusive photo filtering app
What do Instagram, the Ghost In The Shell movie, and (most likely) your high school history class all have in common? A propensity for whitewashing. Instagram’s preset photo filters do not really take into account the variations in people’s skin tone. Most darker skin tones end up getting washed out, lightened, or otherwise distorted in unflattering ways. But a badass team of designers and developers have answered with Tonr, a more inclusive photo filtering app that celebrates dark skin instead of erasing or whitening it. Vox Media’s senior designer Alesha Randolph, designer and illustrator Brittany Holloway-Brown, product engineer Aidan Feay, designer Scott Kellum, and coder Pamela Assogba created Tonr during a 2016 Vox Media hackathon. According to the app’s website, Tonr was created to address photography’s long history of racism and its effects, including social media photo filters that “emulate film but do not correct for the racial disparities” of the industry.
With tonr, our team wanted to create an inclusive app with a variety of photo filters that amplifies how beautiful a variety of skin tones are instead of washing them out. The goal of tonr is to create filters that affirm that black, brown and other skin tones are beautiful. We looked towards deepening the subjects’ skin instead of lightening, emphasizing the richness and saturation of melanin and playing with interesting color overlays.