HOME |
RSS | 
Several studies of American men and women find that if you ask people to identify their favorite color, women tend to select colors closer to red, and men on average tend to select colors around blue. The reason behind this difference is up in the air, but there are several theories. A recent academic paper proposes a new theory to add to the list, the ecological theory:
The authors here propose that humans prefer colors like blues and greens because those colors and ecologically healthy (blue skies, clean water, healthy vegetation), and do not prefer colors like brown because it’s associated with stuff that is ecologically unhealthy (like crap and things that are rotting).
Then they went about testing the theory by correlating color preference with objects that were judged favorable or unfavorable by the test subjects. Although the ecological theory incorporates parts of several other color theories, the data seems to support this idea more than previous theories. Link
Randall Munroe of xkcd conducted an online color survey, the results from 222,500 user sessions are ready. The aim of the survey was to find what names people associate with colors. As you can see, no one knows how to spell fuchsia. I had to stop and roll in the floor at the “disproportionally popular” color names by gender section. Link -via reddit
In this infographic, Stephen Von Worley observes that the number of discrete colors in a box of Caryola Crayons doubles about every 28 years. That’s an annual growth rate of 2.56%. Von Worley writes:
If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons! Shortly thereafter, frazzled packaging designers rejoice, for to the rescue comes a revolution in household appliances: the new-fangled Replicator-Dissociator! Load it with the Crayola plugin, and you’re seconds away from every shade in the rainbow – no boxes required!
Well, you may have heard of at least some of these, but you can expand your color vocabulary. Now you’ll be able to say “malachite” instead of “kind of a dusky teal green” or “sort of like that Ford van color but a tiny bit bluer.” The car shown is the color known as malachite.
This color is also known as basic green 4 and is often used when creating a green dye. This vibrant green comes from the carbonate mineral known as Malachite, or copper carbonate. In the 1800, the mineral was widely used for green paints because it was lightfast and often varied in color. The color is one that is seen rampant in history. For instance, there is the Malachite Room in Hermitage, and it is also said that Demeter’s throne was made of this color as well.
Link -via Interesting Pile
Pantone, the company which business is to know everything there is to know about colors, has just unveiled Color of the Year for 2010 (drumroll, please): turquoise!
"Turquoise is universally appealing. It puts everyone in the same state of mind — on vacation," says Jane Schoenborn, design director at Lilly Pulitzer. "Turquoise for us is a really big color. A lot of times it’s transporting, whether you’re actually going to a resort destination or not."
Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, says there was no runner-up to turquoise in her mind because people crave escapism and freshness after a tough year. The shade is on the cusp of blue and green, which makes it both inviting and serene — characteristics associated with blues — and invigorating and luminous, which comes from green, she says.
"Transporting" was a word many used for turquoise, a shade that takes designer Tommy Hilfiger to the beach, especially the Caribbean, St. Tropez, France, or Southern California, which served as the inspiration for his newest collection. In jewelry, he thinks of the American Southwest, or Central or South America.
Well, that’s better than the Color of the Year 2009, which was Mimosa Yellow: Link | Official Pantone web page about the announcement
Photo: Ronald Playforth
Early in May, 1945, officers from the German army and Gestapo met with Allied commanders, including Field Marshall Montgomery to offer their country’s surrender at his headquarters near Hamburg. Interestingly, the only color photographs of this event were taken by a clerk, Ronald Playforth, who hid in the trees during the meeting.
Thequintessential wrote a brief synopsis of this event:
His pictures show Admiral Hans Georg von Friedeburg, the most senior member of the delegation, General Eberhard Kinzel, chief of staff of the north west Germany army, and Major Friedl, a 6ft 6ins Gestapo chief. They were received by Field Marshall Montgomery, with his customary black beret and army uniform, who, when the Germans tried to negotiate, reportedly gave them a ‘tongue lashing’ about the bombing of Coventry and the horrors of Belsen. The delegation reported back to their HQ and Admiral Karl Doenitz – Hitler’s successor – and were given permission to sign the surrender papers, which they did the next day, May 4. When it was all over Montgomery is said to have leaned back and said simply: ‘That concludes the surrender.’
Media designer Shahee Ilyas has created pie charts showing the colors of the flags of over 200 nations.
Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.
Embedded on top is a screencap of a portion of the display, alphabetically arranged (Afghanistan, Albania…); the original at the artist’s website will display the name of the country when a mouse is passed over the pie chart. The larger pie chart on the bottom is a composite of all the colors from all of the flags.
Via The Life and Times of Michael5000, who notes that the color violet/lavender/purple is notably absent from world flags (as is gray).
Photo by Alan Jaras
Alan Jaras has a creative way of composing his photographs. By focusing a beam of light through transparent, textured materials, and recording that light directly onto 35mm film without the use of a lens, he produces dazzling works of color and light. The images are scanned to a computer, but no CG was used at all. Check out his featured work at two different host sites, or his Flickr.
My Modern Met Link and Neu Black Link
Ken Morrish of Colaton Raleigh, Devon, England picked a bizarre Red Delicious apple off his tree. It looks as if someone stuck together half of a green apple and half of a red apple, but these colors are natural.
John Breach, chairman of the British Independent Fruit Growers Association, said: ‘I’ve never seen this happen before to a Golden Delicious. It is extremely rare. It is an extreme mutation.
‘There has been the occasional case of this type reported. If there was a whole branch of apples with the same colouring then fruit experts would get even more excited.’
Jim Arbury, fruit superintendent at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey, said it was probably the ‘result of a random genetic mutation’.
‘This is known as a chimera where one of the first two cells has developed differently giving rise to one half of the apple being different,’ he said.
Morrish is keeping the apple in his refrigerator because so many people want to see it. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(image credit: Archant Devon)
In her art series See Through, Swedish artist Helga Steppan arranged all her material belongings into separate piles based on color:
This way of working can be clearly seen in the series ‘See Through’ for which Steppan audited all of her belongings and divided them into a full spectrum of different colour groupings to photograph: White, Black, Yellow, Red, Miscellaneous, Blue, Orange, Green, Pink, Grey, Purple, and Brown.
The final images are visually seductive and ask the viewer to consider whether they can discover the artist’s persona reflected in the meticulously constructed installations of her material possessions.
Scientists thought they’d never know what colors the dinosaurs were, since fossils are rock-colored and even recently-discovered mummified scraps of the animals are faded. Jakob Vinther, a graduate student at Yale, was researching fossil feathers when he discovered that melanin granules survived in their original shapes and patterns, which can be compared with existing feathers to determine their original color.
Perhaps the most surprising and most exciting application of this research is that it may allow us to predict the colors of many dinosaurs.
“These include many of our most well loved dinosaurs,” says Prum. “Like velociraptor, the dinosaur that chased the kids around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, was actually fully plumaged.”
While these dinosaur feathers were not used for flight until the appearance of the transitional species Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, they were probably useful for warmth. Prum says we could even learn more about the color of one of the most famous dinosaurs of all, Tyrannosaurus rex.
“In the classic mural The Age of Reptiles in the Yale Peabody museum, they depicted T-rex, which is one of the iconic, huge, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs,” he says. “Recent fossil discoveries have shown that the closest relative of these huge tyrannosaurids actually had tiny skin appendages or fossil feathers—’dino-fuzz.’
Link (with video) -via Metafilter
In India, a newly discovered color-changing frog has been worshipped as a god. Reji Kumar, the person who found it, keeps the frog in a glass jar at his home where hundreds of people come to see it every day.
Apart from the obvious biological findings this hopping lava lamp can provide, it also gives an additional insight as to how religions and spiritual groups can emerge. I don’t blame them either. Who needs color-saturating hallucinogens for spiritual transcendence when you have a kaleidoscopic animal?
I say this new rainbow frog will become the new symbol for racial equality, just as long as it doesn’t croak (which is actually a concern).
The frog was a dazzling white colour when Reji, who is from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, in south India, first spotted it.
Then it changed to yellow and had gone grey by the time he got it home.
“By night the frog was dark yellow, and then it became transparent so you could see its internal organs,” Reji, a life worker, reportedly said.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by robkullberg.
With Multicolr Search Lab by Idée Labs, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most interesting Creative Commons images according to colors (in this case, a set of up to 10 colors). It’s quite speedy and neat!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by McJohnny.
How many animals do you suppose we pass in nature and never notice? Masters of evading humans and other predators, many creatures avoid being seen even at close range. Some of these are color-changers with amazing abilities to mimic not only their natural environs but even, in some cases, the behavior and movement of other species so they can pass as predators rather than as prey.
The ability to change color seems like an animal superpower at times – some of them can alter their appearance to blend with the colors, materials and textures of virtually any surroundings. For some this ‘costume change’ happens quickly, for others it is seasonal – for many it helps them avoid predators, for a few it enables them to sneak up on prey. Culled from around the animal kingdom, here are seven of most impressive color-changing species in the world.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
Call it art, call it obsession, but the results are a rainbow of awesome to be sure. Some of these were done as personal pet projects but one in particular involved the reorganization of an entire store to fit into one big color spectrum of books. Practical? Perhaps not. Appealing? On an aesthetic level: absolutely.
Some of us are more particular about the appearance of our interiors than others – perhaps to a fault. Sick of seeing your books sloppily organized by type, or, worse yet, having them randomly disorganized across a series of bookcases? Sorting your favorite volumes by color may just satisfy that too-organized part of yourself.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
Psychologists at the University of British Columbia have conducted a study on the cognitive effects of colors. They found that red helped subjects concentrate while blue led to greater creativity.
“Think about red, and what comes to mind: stop lights, stop signs, danger, ambulances…People want to avoid those things, and that’s why they do better on detail-oriented tasks…Blue is the color of the sky, the ocean, safety…When their environment is safe, people are more explorative.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.
Comments Off
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
