I recently used a Kindle for the first time. I have never had much interest in them; since a smart phone or a tablet seem to do everything that a Kindle does and a whole lot more. However, there is one advantage of the Kindle and that is that the screen is easier to read the brighter the ambient illumination. So on holiday, for example, the Kindle really comes into its own if you want to read novels on your sun lounger. Nevertheless, it is a major limitation that the screen is only black and white. For reading novels I guess its ok; but for lots of other reading material I think colour would enrich the experience. It had been thought that a colour kindle was many years away. But today I read a report on CNET that claims that Amazon is set to launch a colour e-reader later this year. There are doubts about whether the technology is ready yet … we’ll see.
Whitehall colour branding
The UK government is set to rebrand its departments with bold new colour schemes. The new colours include lots of blues and greens; for example, navy blue for the Foreign Office, bright blue for the NHS and green for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. However, the The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which is purple at the moment, is reassigned bright pink.
Read more here.
School of Design website
The School of Design at the University of Leeds has a new website! It’s based on WordPress too which is pretty cool.
CGIV Amsterdam
The latest CGIV (European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision) conference is taking place in Amsterdam now (6-9 May 2012). CGIV covers a wide range of topics related to colour and visual information, including color science, computational color, color in computer graphics, color reproduction, color vision/psychophysics, color image quality, color image processing, and multispectral color science. For further details see here.
Nadal hits out at never-before-seen colour
I was quite excited to come across this news story today. I do sometimes get asked by people about colours that nobody has ever seen before. So the notion that Nadal had seen one was quite interesting. However, it turns out that it is not a colour that has never been seen before but a clay colour that has never been used before in a ranking tennis tournament. Doh!!
The controversial use of blue courts at the ATP-WTA Madrid Masters may be a poor choice. One of the requirements of a clay court colour is to ensure good contrast between the ball and the ground.
pink or red?
The purpose of this blog is to collate all sorts of interesting facts and news stories for which colour is a main component and also to provide some education about colour and colour science. So I scan the newspapers and websites for interesting stories about colour that I can comment on (actually, I mainly look at news stories on google). Over the last three years or so I have come across all kinds of interesting topics but today I came across something quite unexpected.
Today I came across some research led by Sarah Johns at the University of Kent that reveals that men prefer pink female genitals to red ones. Her team set up a website that allowed women to submit (anonymously, you will be pleased to know) photographs of their parts. Four of these photos were each retouched (digitally) so that one pale pink, another light pink, one dark pink and the final one red. They then asked 40 heterosexual men to rate each of the 16 images on a scale of 0-100 for attractiveness. The researchers had thought that men may prefer red vulvas since it is commonly thought that red lipstick and clothing is a proxy for genitals. So it was somewhat surprising when they found that men preferred the pink photographs to the red ones.
For more details on this story please visit here.
colour maps
Last year a student, Kaori, from Japan spent some time with me at Leeds and we spoke a lot about how to use colour effectively in maps and in urban design generally. One of the issues we were looking at was whether the maps’ features would be discriminable to colour-blind observers (of which, of course, there are many). So I was interested to come across an interesting article today relating to this very issue.
Apparently the following image appeared in the Guardian newspaper:
It’s a colour-coded map of London. It shows areas of deprivation with red being the most deprived. It met with much criticism, however, and many people said they had difficulty in discriminating between the colours. Of course, colour-blind observers most commonly have difficulty discriminating in the red-green region of colour space. The company who made the map engaged in a debate with users on twitter and created variously different coloured versions of the map, subjecting each to the public vote via twitter. The map below is one of the later versions.
For further details please refer to the story at The Guardian here.
chemical additives
A few weeks ago I posted about the safety of food colours. My argument was that the issue is not whether food additives are natural or man-made (let’s even say chemical because that really sounds nasty – even though water is a chemical and we are made of chemicals). Rather, the issue is whether any additives are safe or not, since plenty of natural products are highly dangerous (even fatal) and the vast majority of man-made additives are perfectly safe. My good friend, Mark Bishop (Professor at Goldsmiths) commented that maybe people feel safer with natural additives because they have been around for longer and so we are more certain about whether they are safe or not. He may have a point – today it was revealed that 4-methylimidazole (which is added to Pepsi and Coca-Cola) is carcinogenic. Presumably this chemical was once thought to be safe.
Blog Repost – Edible Pantone colour tarts
women like pink
I don’t know if it is related to my recent post that people, especially females buy bright colours in times of austerity, but I just came across a report that claims that women like pink gadgets and laptops.
Dr Gloria Moss, Reader in Human Resources at Bucks New University said:
“There’s a very strong tendency for men to prefer hard, rectangular and dark shapes. While women showed a preference towards more curved, and pink design. I don’t think it’s anything for women to be afraid of that women like different colours, because the roots of the colour preference take womens’ responsibility beyond hearth and home. The differences have their origins in the different activities carried out by men and women over the ages.”
Moss used a range of website designs created by men and women to test her hypothesis amongst a sample group of students at Oxford. Men preferred linear, rectangular designs, while women preferred colourful designs with large images.
I’m a man but I also like pink. So clearly the above does not apply to all women and all men.
For balance see my post on pink stinks.