The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 42,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 10 Film Festivals
What is it about taxis that makes colour so controversial?
In 2009 I posted about the situation in Derby (UK) where the council introduced a new rule saying that all official taxis should be yellow and then got into trouble when they said that one taxi driver’s taxi was not exactly the right shade of yellow. How did they specify the colour?
A couple of years later there was a major political storm over a proposal for Durham (also UK – ooops …. embarrassing!!!) to adopt white as the official taxi colour.
Then in 2012 I wrote about taxi colour in Beijing. Well, this was not exactly news but by now taxi colour was starting to interest me!!
But guess what? Today, another genuine taxi colour story. This time it is in USA. The D.C. Taxicab Commission’s One Color Panel recommended Wednesday that District taxis be coloured red. Apparently, “Red is a color that is strongly associated with the District, both among residents and visitors,” the colour panel said in a statement. “The Stars and Bars of the District flag are red. Each of the major sports franchises in the District has a shade of red as a prominent part of the uniform. In the area of transportation, both the District’s Circulator bus and the Capital BikeShare vehicles are red.” All taxis will be required to change to the new colour within five years.
According to a recent study eye colour plays a role in deciding how trustworthy others will think you are. Researchers simply asked a group of people to rate the trustworthiness of male and female faces. It was found that a majority of people found people with brown eyes to appear more trustworthy. This was true for both sexes but particularly so for men.
But it turns out that it is face shape that is more important and eye colour is a major factor because brown-eyed people tend to have certain facial characteristics. For the original story see here.
If you like colour you may just love this picture. I do. It’s from the Sydney colour run for further details and a larger version of the image see the original story in The Guardian.
Looks like an interesting online colour course here.
Unfortunately, only the first video (which simply talks about what you will learn in the others) is free. To watch the others you need to have paid a subscription. Shame.
Did you know you can get a qualification in colour. See Graham Clayton’s colour blog for more details. Graham is Chief Executive of the Society of Dyers and Colourists (SDC) and regularly blogs about colour. I am a Fellow of the SDC myself and have been involved in the organisation since 1982 believe it or not – more than 30 years!!!!
Most humans are trichromatic; that is, our colour vision is mediated by three types of light receptor in our eyes. These receptors are known as cones and the three types have peak sensitivity in different parts of the colour spectrum. We sometimes refer to these as LMS cones because of their peak sensitivity at long-, medium- and short-wavelengths light.
Some people (men, in the main) are colour blind and this is because they are anomalous trichromats (they have three cones but the spectral sensitivities are less optimal than they should be or they are dichromats (they are missing the L, M or S cone types). But what about other species?
Most mammals are dichromats including dogs and cats. However, many fish and birds have better colour vision than do we humans. I just came across an article that reports that chicknes have five cones compared with our three. The research has been conducted the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (USA). It is suggested that birds often have more cones than we do because they descended directly from dinosaurs and never spent any part of their evolutionary past living in the dark.
According to this article black and white is back in fashion this year. Hopefully one day soon brown and beige will be back and I will once more be a fashionable gent about town!
Another simulator on the market that shows you what your image or website would look like to someone who is colour blind. This one is from a company called ETRE – for further details see http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/
In the image series below the left image is normal and the ones in the middle and right show protonopia and deuteranopia respectively.
For more on colour blindness see my earlier post.
Colour Forecasting is big business. What is it? Well, if you search on the internet you may find something like this:
Design firms and retail markets utilize forecasting services to predict trends in color. Color forecasting helps designers (who work a season ahead) what fabrics and styles will be popular in future months or years. Color forecasting resources help predict trends in the fashion industry, and also home home design.
This suggests that colour forecasting predicts which colours will be fashionable in the future; for example, next year. However, I think there is another way to look at it. I am not at all sure that it is a prediction process at all; I prefer to refer to it as a marketing process. This is what happens. A group of people work very hard and have a great deal of expertise and through their activity and global network they produce a ‘prediction’ of what colour will be popular next year. Normally the prediction is not a single colour but a colour palette; but for simplicity let’s assume that it is a single colour and it’s red. The last thing retailers want is stock they cannot sell so they are very keen to find out what the colour forecasters are saying. When they hear that red is going to be popular they make sure that they purchase and stock large amounts of red stuff. Fashion magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue want readers to buy their magazines and want to be seen to be on trend and so they publish story after story about how the next big thing is going to be red. Now think about the consumer. The fashion magazines are full of red and the stores are full of red. What do you think the consumer is going to buy? Can you see why I think the process is more about consumer manipulation than it is about prediction (in the scientific sense)?
Actually, that colour forecasting is not a really a prediction process isn’t even my main gripe. Rather, it is that colour forecasting (and the fashion industry more generally) encourages people to buy more clothes than they need. Do we really need to keep up with the latest fashions? Our consumption of textiles is already unsustainable and we cannot go on behaving as we have done in the past.
One of the final-year students in the School of Design at the University of Leeds is undertaking a research dissertation in this area which I am supervising. She’s running a short questionnaire and needs as many people as possible to complete it. It’s very short; please take a look here.