Category Archives: news

yellow transport

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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!

 yell_taxi

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

yellow bus 

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).

yellow bus usa

The approximate colour can be obtained by #FFD800 or [255 216 0] in RGB values.

cure for colour blindness

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One of the reasons I enjoy travelling by train is that it gives me an opportunity to read a newspaper from front to back (something I very much enjoy but rarely have time to do). Yesterday I was travelling to Bristol where I was delivering a lecture at the IMPACT6 Printmaking conference on colour management and took the train from Leeds to Bristol during which I was able to read The Times. I couldn’t fail to notice the story about a potential cure for colour blindness – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/medicine/article6837392.ece

Congenital red-green colour blindness occurs when either the L- or M-cone class is either missing (making the sufferer a dicromat) or shifted in terms of peak wavelength of sensitivity (resulting in anomalous trichromacy) – see http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/colour-blindness-news/.

Scientists working at the universities of Seattle and Florida have restored normal colour vision to two colour-blind monkeys by injecting a virus with a modified gene (called L opsin) that is known to be responsible for red-green colour blindness. The success of this work is remarkable in that it suggests that the brain is able to rewire itself to take advantage of the new receptors. 24 weeks after the injection the monkeys were able to correctly distinguish patterns of grey, green and red dots that they had previously been unable to distinguish.

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Jay Neitz, professor ophthalmology at the University of Washington, is now looking to start work that could lead to a similar treatment for humans.

The work has just been published in Nature – http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090916/full/news.2009.921.html 

world’s first coloured bubbles

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An inventor – Tim Kehoe – spent 15 years and £2,000,000 developing the world’s first non-staining bubbles – he calls them zubbles!! See http://www.zubbles.com/

zubbles

The bubbles contain a special dye that fades within 15 minutes of the bubble bursting. This is a clever use of a property of dyes – fading – that is usually thought of as a bad property and which scientists strive hard to eliminate. The special dyes developed for this product fade when exposed to air, light or pressure.

This reminds me somewhat of the breakfast cereal – cocopops – where the brown colorant in the cereal leaks out into the milk turning it a muddy brown colour. Not a nice thing – you might think. However, Kelloggs turned this into a marketing success with the phrase – “So chocolately it even turns the milk brown”. I’ve always thought this was very very clever. Very clever.

Kelloggs_Coco_Pops_375g

What colour were the dinosaurs?

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Have you ever wondered what colour the dinosaurs were? Probably not, but when you think about it – how could we know. Fossils are …. well, … fossil coloured. The movies portray most of the dinosaurs as greyish, probably because the biggest land mammal we know – the elephant – is grey. Dinosaurs are also sometimes portrayed to be similar in colour to many lizzards and reptiles that are alive today – and I suppose that makes some sense. But is there any way we can work out what colour the dinosaurs really were? Probably not ….

dinosaur-replica1 

Until Jakob Vinther’s work that is. Jakob is currently working towards a PhD in paleontology at Yale University – http://www.jakobvinther.com/.

Part of Jakob’s interest is the preservation of malanin in fossils. He has discovered that melanin granules survive in their original shapes and patterns, which can be compared with existing feathers to determine their original color. One possible application of this work is that we may be able to make a very good guess at what colour many dinosaurs really were based on an analysis of their fossil remains.

colour picker pen design

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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.

color_picking02color_picking01-THUMB

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/

automatic extraction of colour palette from image

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I just came across another interesting colour site – www.colorexplorer.com

This site provides a free service – you can upload an image and the site will extact a colour palette from the image (you can specify how many colours you wish to extract). Palettes are notated in hex codes and RGB values.

I just tried with with one of my images and chose to extact three colours; the result is shown below:

drum4

pallete

If you want to use a photograph as an inspiration for interior design, for example, you can write down the RGB values and then go to www.easyrgb.com – this site allows you to convert RGB values into commercial paint codes.

software aids colour design for colour blindness

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In a previous post I talked about colour blindness and the possibility of using coloured lenses to improve colour discrimination for suffers of colour blindness – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/colour-blindness-news/

The task of designing images or copy that are legible to colour-blind users is a major concern in design. In the past I have used websites that allow you to submit an image or even a whole website and a simulation of how it might apear to a colour-blind viewer would be produced. Today I came across a really great tool called Color Oracle – see http://colororacle.cartography.ch/. This tool is free to download and runs on Windows or Mac systems. Once installed it runs in your system tray and allows you to simulate various colour-blindnessc conditions. The software is free to download and claims to use the latest algorithms for simulating colour-vision impairments.  Below is one of my images and a simulation of how it would appear to someone with tritanopia.

carlberg

new white roof coating

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A new white coating that reflects 85% of the heat that hits it is being trialled in Los Angeles. The new coating, developed by former military scientists Ronald Savin, reduces the surface temperature of the roof by as much as 50 C and thus reduces the amount of energy required to cool the interior of the building. Suffice to say, as I write this in rainy Cornwall, there is no requirement as yet for this coating in the UK!

white roof

For full story see http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/realestate/2009578076_roofs02.html

colormunki colour management

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Colour management is needed to try to ensure that when using computer systems colour fidelity is achieved across different machines and between soft and hard copy. Computers represent colour as three numbers, RGB. But the same RGB values displayed on different monitors will usually result in a different on-screen colour. In addition, there could be colour gamut issues; one monitor may be able to display colours that are simply out of the achievable range of another. When we consider printers the problem is even worse. The gamut of a printer is very different to that of a computer display. And printers tend to represent colour in terms of CMY or CMYK values. So the colour-management software has rather a lot to do to satisfy users.

A great deal of colour management goes on in computer systems of which the average user is completely unaware. This uses default settings and makes various assumptions but is normally good enough so that reds appear red and blues appear blue on any computer display or printer. Colour management has been built in to Apple software for a long while and is now also part of the Microsoft operating system. But the professional user may require more than is offered by the basic colour management that comes as part of all new systems. However, professional-level colour management comes at a cost and it’s not just financial. It is usually necessary to have to characterize each device (monitor display, printer etc.) that is to be used; and this requires colour measurment and some knowledge of colorimetry.

I recently came across a new product – ColorMunki 1.1 – released by X-rite that promises enhanced colour performance for colour-critical users. This seems to be an interesting product in that it is aimed at designers and photographers.

ColorMunk 1.1 – http://www.colormunki.com/ – is in fact a suite of software that also include a device for measuring colour. I am looking forward to trying this out. If anyone has any experience of this system that they would like to share it would be vey helpful.

sheep change colour

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the moths in the UK that are now changing colour as a result of changes in their environment. The species that darkened in colour in response to the industrial revolution is now becoming lighter again – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/moths-change-colour-again/.

Today I came across a story about sheep changing colour; this time in response to global warming, apparently. According to Dr Maloney at the University of Western Australia,  in colder environments, mammals with darker coats absorb more solar radiation and so need to expend less food energy keeping warm than do their lighter counterparts. He has found fewer dark coloured Soay sheet over the last 20 years and links this to changing temperatures. H expects the proportion of dark sheep to decrease further over the coming years. His work was reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters but a summary is availale online at The Telegraph – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5879613/Bye-bye-black-sheep—climate-change-making-sheep-change-colour.html.

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