I just came across a really cool tool – see http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/
You click on a swatch colour and the tool finds images from flickr that are that colour. It doesn’t sound that great. But please give it a try. It’s mucho fun!! 🙂
Category Archives: design
2010 colour of the year
For the last few years Pantone has been selecting its colour of the year at around this time. This year the colour of the year was mimosa (that’s yellow to you and me) and next year the colour of the year will be turquoise.
See http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/pantone.aspx?pg=20706&ca=10
pink stinks?
PinkStinks (http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/) is a campaign and social enterprise that challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives. The campaign has been running for 18 months and activists argue that while a wide variety of boys’ toys are available, those for girls are often predominantly pink. They argue that body image obsession is starting younger and younger, and that the seeds are sown during the pink stage, as young girls are taught the boundaries within which they will grow up, as well as narrow and damaging messages about what it is to be a girl.
It’s interesting that the notion of pink for girls and blue for boys has not always been so. A recent article on the BBC web site claims that in 1918 the Ladies’ Home Journal included the statement: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” For more see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8401742.stm.
the power of red
An interesting article in New Scientist has explored the influence of colour on the choices we make; how we act and think. The article – http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327232.400-winners-wear-red-how-colour-twists-your-mind.html?full=true – quotes research published in Psychologial Science that revealed that the colour of clothing worn by competitors in a taekwondo contest affects the decisions even by experienced referees. In short, competitors wearing red were awarded 13% more points than those dressed in blue
This builds on previous research published in Nature in 2005 – http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7040/full/435293a.html – that showed that between 55% and 62% of bouts in Olympic combat contests were won by competitors wearing red when in fact red and blue should have won 50% each if colour had no effect. Robert Barton, from Durham University (UK) has argued that the colour red could influence the mind of the referee but could also affect the mental state and performance of the competitor.
Interestingly, 38 of the last 63 top division soccer titles in England have been won by teams in red (Manchester, United, Arsenal, Liverpool) and goalkeepers feel more confident about saving a penalty from a player in a white shirt than in a red one. Both of these facts were taken from papers published in Journal of Sports Sciences.
new Sony Ericsson logo
Almost eight years back when Japanese consumer electronics company Sony Corporation and Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson forged a partnership to make cell phones, an artist designed the liquid-eye crystal logo of Sony Ericsson on a napkin in a restaurant. It had just one colour — emerald green.
Last month, Sony Ericsson decided to add seven new colours to the logo in keeping with the change in the idea of entertainment and the convergence of devices over these years. The company also adopted the Sony brand message ‘make.believe’ in all consumer communication to reinforce its entertainment credentials and collaboration with the Sony Group.
Sony Ericsson will also expand the appeal of its ‘liquid identity’ logo “by not only adding the new colour variations but also a new ‘liquid energy’ flowing from the logo to make it more playful and visually appealing for the digital arena”. Sony Ericsson currently distributes its brand primarily through its 47 “experience” stores (which it plans to expand), Sony Centres and Exclusives (smaller stores), multi-brand outlets like Chroma and “mom and pop” stores.
sustainable colour design
Does wearing a white T-shirt really help you keep cool in the summer?
Absolutely. White objects tend to reflect most of the light that falls upon them no matter what the wavelength in the visible spectrum. Objects are often coloured because they selectively absorb certain wavelengths of light preferentially compared with other wavelenghs that are then reflected. But what happens to the light that is absorbed? Well, in most cases dye or pigment molecules absorb the energy and go to a higher energy state. But as every physicist knows, energy must be preserved. Eventually, the energy is released, usually in the form of heat. Now an object which is black is a very strong absorber and often absorbs much of the light at all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Therefore a black T-shirt will heat up when exposed to the sun when compared with a white T-shirt.
This idea has been taken further by a team of MIT graduates who have developed roof tiles that change colour based on the temperature. The tiles become white when it’s hot, allowing them to reflect away most of the sun’s heat. When it’s cold they turn black and absorb heat when it’s needed.
In their white state the tiles reflect about 80% of the sunlight falling on them, while black they reflect about 30%. That means in their white state, they could save as much as 20% of present cooling costs, according to recent studies.
The tiles use a common commercial polymer in a water solution. That solution is encapsulated — between layers of glass and plastic in their original prototype, and between flexible plastic layers in their latest version — with a dark layer at the back.
When the temperature is below a certain level the polymer stays dissolved and the black backing shows through, absorbing the sun’s heat. When the temperature climbs, the polymer condenses to form tiny droplets, whose small sizes scatter light and thus produce a white surface, reflecting the sun’s heat.
The team was one of the competitors in this year’s Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest (MADMEC) a competition for teams of MIT students.
For further information see http://thermeleon.com/
colour meaning
At some point I intend to post something about colour meaning or what I like to call colour semiotics. However, in the meantime you may like to refer to this blog entry – http://dressdesigning.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/discover-how-to-understand-color-for-dress-designing/ – about understanding colour for dress designing (though the advice seems quite generic and not connected with dress designing at all). It’s a reasonable primer into the meanings of colour.
Colorgorize
I just came across this website – http://www.colorgorize.com/about/
The first version of Colorgorize was published in 2007 as a project at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Back then, Colorgorize was a Firefox add-on that could display similar colored websites to the website currently opened. Colorgorize was changed to a website in 2009 to reach a bigger audience. Today, thousands of websites are already analyzed and can be searched by colors.
Colorgorize is essentially a site where you can get inspiration for web-design colours and palettes. It works by shrinking imags of webapages that can be organized according to your colour preference.
yellow transport
In the UK, official taxis run by the council tend to be black. However, Derby – a city in the UK – introduced a new regulation in 2001 that all the official taxis should be yellow. Presumably this was to make them more distinctive so that members of the public would be more certain that they were getting into an official taxi rather than an illegal one. One of the taxi drivers – John Kirkham – painted his car yellow to comply but was then shocked to have his application for the renewal of his licence refused because he had used the wrong shade of yellow!
The council backed down after adverse publicity. If only they had specified the colour tolerance as part of their specification they would have had a much stronger case.
Another reason for choosing yellow could be safety. Many school buses in USA are yellow – presumably for reasons of safety. A number of regions in the UK have recently been trialling the use of yellow buses. Getting more school children to travel to School by bus is seen as being good for the environment and would free up the congested roads. In the USA more than half of all chidren travel to School by yellow buses according to the BBC – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7610933.stm
The use of yellow for school buses in the USA was introduced in 1939. The colour – National School Bus Chrome Yellow – was introduced for reasons of consistency and also for safety because of its high visibility. Cost was also a consideration since manufacturers charged extra for special colours. In addition the black lettering was easily visible by contrast on the yellow background (as you can see in the picture below).
The approximate colour can be obtained by #FFD800 or [255 216 0] in RGB values.
colour picker pen design
The idea is that you can use this pen to point at any object in the world, the pen then ‘extracts’ the colour, and then is able to write in that colour using a mixture of RGB inks that it contains.
Unfortunately, it’s just a concept, designed by Jinsu Park.
As far as I know there are no practical implementations of this interesting idea. One could make a strong argument that the pen should use CMY (or even red, yellow and blue) primaries since RGB primaries would result in a tiny colour gamut and wouldn’t allow the pen to reproduce any real colours at all. See http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/what-is-a-colour-primary/