kottke.org posts about color
This segment of the most recent episode of Radiolab about color is super interesting. It seems that people haven't always seen colors in the same way we do today.
What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last.
It's worth listening to the whole thing...the bit at the end with the linguist's daughter and the color of the sky is especially cool.
Artist Angelica Dass pairs photographs of people with the Pantone colors of their skin colors.
More of the project can be found on her Tumblr. (via designboom)
Olafur Eliasson's latest project is now on display at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark...it's a circular viewing platform with rainbow-hued glass.
This Wikipedia page has HTML hex codes for all of the 133 standard Crayola crayon colors, including Silver, Blue Green, Melon, Wild Strawberry, and Forest Green.
Dan Kaminsky's iPhone/Android app corrects for color blindness (in anomalous trichromats anyway)...just point your phone at what you want to see in color and make a few adjustments.
The vast majority of color blind people are in fact what are known as anomalous trichromats. They still have three photoreceptors, but the 'green' receptor is shifted a bit towards red. The effect is subtle: Certain reds might look like they were green, and certain greens might look like they were red.
Thus the question: Was it possible to convert all reds to a one true red, and all greens to a one true green?
The answer: Yes, given an appropriate colorspace.
Andy Baio, who is colorblind, says emphatically: "it works". (thx, derek)
I remember reading that Greek and Roman statues were originally painted, but I didn't know that through the use of modern scientific equipment, we actually know how they looked.
(via @brainpicker)
This visualization represents a year in color (summer is at the top, winter at the bottom).
The images were taken of the Boston Common, courtesy of Flickr.
Cory Arcangel has a new show opening tonight at Team Gallery in Soho called Adult Contemporary. I got a peek at it last night and my favorite piece is called Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 4160 x=0. It's easy enough to whip up your own by following those instructions in Photoshop but the print itself is gorgeous. When you get up close to it, there is no discernible gradation between the colors and, because it's so uniform and smooth and glossy and big, you lose your sense of depth perception and you don't really know how close you are to it. I almost fell over looking at it because I was so disoriented.
Turn the left slice topwise in style: Pantone + Rubik's Cube = Pantone Rubik's Cube. (via monoscope)
Idée Multicolr Search Lab is pretty amazing. You select up to ten colors and it returns Flickr photos with those colors. I couldn't stop playing with this.
An exploded toner cartridge.
Accidents should always be this beautiful.
(via chrisglass)
COLOURlovers, the site that takes inspiration from colors in the real world to make design palettes, today has a collection of palettes inspired by some wickedly vibrant bruises.
All blacks are not created equal...a team at Rensselaer and Rice University have created the world's darkest material. Plain old black paint reflects between 5 and 10 percent of incident light; the new material reflects only 0.045%. (via animamundi)
Related to last month's post about monochromatic outfits, here's some photos of children who do the same thing, pink for the girls and blue for the boys.
korean artist jeongmee yoon's 'pink and blue project' was inspired by her daughter. she would only wear pink and buy pink toys.
I find it interesting/odd that the children, some of whom aren't more than five years old, are the ones presumed to be making the color choice here. (via a.whole)
Profiles of 5 New Yorkers that dress in only one color.
Why gray?
I actually wore turquoise for eight years, but last September, I switched to gray. I'd had a bad year and needed to get out of it.
That's a big switch.
I like everything to be clean, and gray is clean. Gray is between black and white, so it's a noncolor, almost. I feel messy and unclean if I wear other colors.
Where do you shop?
I make all my own clothes. I can't wear anyone else's.
What about shoes?
That's hard because even the soles of my shoes have to be gray or white. I get annoyed if the soles are black.
Buzzfeed has more on monochromatic outfits.
Simple little web page: What Color is the Empire State Building? Includes an explanation of why...today it's red/pink/white for Valentine's Day.
Wear Palettes takes the outfits showcased in street fashion photos snapped by The Sartorialist and makes color palettes. 1500 different palettes so far.
Color Matters examines four legal battles over color trademark infringement in packaging and branding, each decided by a test of "color functionality."
The U.S. courts denied Ambrit's request for protection of blue, on the basis that royal blue when used to package frozen desserts was functional and could not be monopolized in a trademark. The ruling stated "Royal blue is a 'cool color;' it is suggestive of coldness and used by a multitude of ice cream and frozen dessert producers." Although the ruling acknowledged the issue of protecting the consumer from confusion, preventing a monopoly of a functional color was a greater issue.
(via CG Explorer)
Synesthesia is:
...a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.
For some people, this means that numbers are associated with colors...5 is blue, 2 is red, etc. In a recent experiment, a person with synesthesia was found to experience colors associated with numbers even though they were colorblind...colors that person had never actually seen with his eyes.
That may seem strange, but what it really means is that the subject had problems with his retina that left him able to distinguish only an extremely narrow range of wavelengths when looking at most images in the world -- his brain was fine, but his eyes weren't quite up to the job. But when he saw certain numbers, he experienced colors that he otherwise never saw.
He called the colors "martian colors". (via the best thing i learned today)
Graph of the movie poster colors of the top-grossing movies, from the brightly colored G-rated movies to the dark and fleshy NC-17 films.
Clever technique for pinching the colors from famous paintings using the Match Color tool in Photoshop. "The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?"
Colors that have stood for things for a long time, like red for stop, green for money, and white for surrender.
If you love color palettes and people who love color palettes, you'll love COLOURlovers. Love love color colour love color love.
Color Code is a "color portrait of the English language". It's a treemap visualization created by assigning over 33,000 words its own color (colors are determined by averaging the colors of images found for each word on the web). If it's running a little slow on your machine, check out the gallery for some neat examples. By Martin Wattenberg, creator of the grandaddy treemap app, Map of the Market.
