kottke.org posts about color
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.
Pie charts representing the flags of the world’s nations…the area of each color on the charts corresponds to the percentage of that color used in the respective flag. I’ll take this opportunity to again maintain that Rem Koolhaas’ barcode flag for the EU is, technically speaking, wicked awesome. (via colourlovers)
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.
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