At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media since the 1800s. You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease, but one does not exist. At least, the "explosion" the data shows is a very minor increase that does not affect the overall pattern.
The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.
The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.
Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.
If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.)
Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.
Yeah I'm pretty skeptical of that visualisation anyway. It sure looks like there's more grey scale, but that's because they've grouped it all at the top. If you actually look at the pixels in the below "white" a lot of them are very dark and unsaturated too.
I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
The data shows an explosion of "new" colours in the 1960s, although the trend never stopped. Technology is still no doubt the answer – including the explosion in the black to white spectrum. We aren't limited to natural colours or colours, period, like we once were.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.
The big difference between 1800s and the 1960s is that oil paints were mixed “onsite” for color and the the 1960s had the commcerialization of latex paints and Pantone colors.
I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.
> But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
This is meaningless.
"When many things are different, everything is the same".
Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing.
"000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because in the second sequence they're different and in the first they're all the same? Great, you just discovered sets and the axiom of choice.
We are literally discussing the difference within the sets! Obviously the second sequence is more diverse.
First, I thought your argument was going somewhere but then it took this turn.
I would agree with the first part and then argue that before the synthetics-revolution things were mostly just shades of browns(which is a type of dark unsaturated orange). Except for the upper classes who could afford the expensive colors. Now that color is cheap and normalized, it lost (some) of its allure. Not being able to signal your wealth anymore.
Now adding just a conjecture of mine; Now that 'clean' is still somewhat more expensive(upper classes still being able to afford more cleanliness by using other peoples labor), minimal textures(not literal textures but design-wise) are more attractive because it displays your wealth. Plain-white being the easiest to see blemishes on. With black being easier look unblemished. Also, 'tasteful' color arrangements will still signal your class somewhat due to requiring cultural knowledge.
I'm going to change your first example. Can you see what stands out?
"00000000qq000000000I0000000"
Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?
"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"
Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.
But you're contrasting chaotic use of many different colors with neutrality, and arguing for environments with very little color rather than well-coordinated color; you argued above that color was just one element along with size, shape, texture etc., as if these qualities were mutually exclusive and design should only emphasize one at any given time.
Well yes, in practice color often is chaotic. Nobody is color-coordinating the cars in the road, or the houses on a street, or the signs and advertisements and billboards. It's a free-for-all that turns into garish noise.
And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
I would describe it more as noise... When there are loud, clashing color patterns everywhere, it all turns into noise and nothing really stands out. It's like watching analog TV with poor reception... there's stuff there, but really hard to make out or focus.
I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.
Modern SCADA systems are designed like this too. They used to be a riot of programmer art in primary colours, with most things blinking at any one time. Now they’re grey-on-grey for anything “nominal” with alarms in orange or red. Far less migraine inducing and far easier to see the important things.
Sure you can. Red rose in a field of green for example. Human eyes evolved to see the colours the way they do precisely because they were working in a world where nearly everything is colourful and some things needed to stand out.
Have you looked at a field recently? Spot the flowers: https://wallpapercave.com/field-of-flowers-wallpaper - I'm not sure what you call colourful; but I call those colourful. The flowers are still hard to miss. The colour makes them more obvious.
If you want a more academic source; try https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/courses/120/Lectures/... slides 13 & 14. Colour isn't some random distraction, the human vision system uses it to help decide what to focus on. Then you get things like peacocks where they go all in on using colourful visualisations to attract attention.
> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth.
I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.
This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).
The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama, and then also a serious technical problem involving HDR device-side (which is a whole other story).
But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.
However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.
Right. For a long time I wondered what's going on, and eventually started believing it's my fault - that maybe I'm just a rare HDR-poor person watching TV shows on SDR computer displays, maybe I've hit an unusual corner case in the video decoding path, or something. I kept believing that until Star Trek: Picard, Season 3, which made it clear it's not me, it's them.
The whole show, like everything in the past decade or so, was dark and washed out (except for some space FX parts, where at least some colors were saturated, sometimes). This lasted up until the last two episodes, where for plot reasons[0], some protagonists found themselves onboard a ship from TNG-era shows (1980s - 2000s), pulled straight from a museum, which means the set was recreated as it was on old shows, complete with the lighting. From that scene onwards through the final episode, as it jumped between that one special set and every other dark and gray scene, I had proof in front of me that scenes in modern shows can be properly lit, they just aren't, and it's an active choice[1].
Importantly, this scene wasn't a one-off gimmick that risked coming out too bright on normal people's HDR-enabled TV screens. The set involved was, per the showrunner, pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the entire season, and they burned most of the season's budget on perfecting it[2]. Them being able to light it well (and have it coexist with every other badly-lit scene) only proves there's no technical obstacle involved - that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
--
[0] - Hard to navigate around a major spoiler and highlight of the era in the franchise.
[1] - Actually, I can't give this scene enough justice. But given how massive moment that was for people following the franchise, I'll just provide a link to the video (SPOILER WARNING): https://youtu.be/t-mY4Xbjyn8?t=42 -- watch in max quality; compare okay-ish exterior CG early on, observe how dark and washed out scenes with people are - and this is literally how the entire season (and really, entire show) was until that point... or just scroll to 2:27, and then on a perfect cue - "computer, lights!" - observe how next 30 seconds reveal that everything could've been properly lit from the start, but for some non-tech reason, it wasn't.
[2] - Most of that was eaten up by casting very specific people, but the set itself was damn expensive too.
> that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.
Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.
But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.
> It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge".
It is. The article you link even begins:
> So many TV shows and movies now
That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.
You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.
It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
> The article you link even begins: "So many TV shows and movies now"
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
> The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama
You're absolutely wrong, it happened to video games too. The industry defended it by saying it made games look more "realistic", but have since backed off after consumers revolted and dubbed the aesthetic "piss filter."
Started in the mid 00s, went strong for about a decade and still persists to a lesser degree today. Only designers like it, consumers broadly hate it.
Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.
It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.
Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.
According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.
The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen different vendors over a year-long post-production cycle. This can still work when you have a director like a James Cameron who's hands-on throughout the process and has top-notch VFX director and cinematography skills. But that's not the norm. This creates systemic incentives for directors, cinematographers and LDs to lens flat, unexpressive shots. Because if there's not consistent, hand-on creative direction over the whole process, the editor and colorist are left trying to stitch together a bunch of shots and elements that weren't created to exist cohesively in the same frame. I suspect not managing this complexity is how visual disasters like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania happen.
Sadly, there's no reason it has to be this way. Technically, it's entirely possible to create a VFX-heavy movie that looks like every part of every frame was lensed by a master like Bernardo Bertolucci. There's nothing required that's even that hard or expensive compared to modern VFX blockbuster complexity or budgets. I think the reason we haven't seen it yet is two-fold: today's top producers, directors and cinematographers rarely have the new and diverse skill sets required in one person and none of the few with the skills and experience has had both the creative intention and budget to do it. I'm actually hopeful that maybe in the next few years someone like a Nolan or Cameron will decide to try to take it to this level as an aspiration. Currently, many of those with the budgets and cred are choosing to address the challenge by reverting to creating effects with practical sets and in-camera techniques. This can avoid the problem but it's looking backward instead of embracing the challenge and doing the pioneering work of figuring out how to push through and solve it. Whoever does it may discover all-new creative and expressive capabilities.
But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable.
They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras.
We didn't "forget" how to "make movies look like movies". We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom. And like always, people will disagree over aesthetic choices.
I totally understand what you mean, though, about lighting vs grading, and where what gets done, but there are good arguments for doing more with grading rather than in the lighting. It ultimately allows the editor+grader+director to make a lot more choices, and that's generally a good thing. You say "color grading in post should be for small tweaks" but I respectfully disagree. And obviously, there isn't even a choice when it comes to the outdoors in daytime -- it has to be done in the grading.
I broadly agree with what you're saying. In my post, I was specifically addressing cases where a lack of expressive diversity in looks is a result of the factors discussed - basically the failure mode where color grading becomes a crutch instead of one part of an intentionally crafted look. In non-failure cases, color grading can be fantastically expressive and a key element in the cinematographer's toolbox.
As I mentioned, the problem is a strange lack of visual diversity in looks. I'm all for increasing artistic and expressive range and I'm not one of those pining for old-school processes. As you said, film had and still has a lot of limitations. Having been involved in both pre-digital film production and analog video production, we had to spend stupid amounts of effort to avoid or overcome the inherent technical limitations we were saddled with. It was incredibly frustrating and I'd spend time dreaming about a future where those technical (and chemical) limitations no longer haunted us. I guess that's why I'm sort of dismayed that so many creators aren't utilizing the truly incredible technical fidelity even consumer gear provides today.
I should also have mentioned I don't fully agree with every point made in the video I linked but it is a terrific way to highlight that the issue isn't technical limitations of digital production. It's either an explicit creative choice to settle for visual blandness or the result of not making explicit choices leading to an ambient default sameness.
> We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom.
That's what I find delightful about today's best work. And I'm fine respecting different creative choices, as long as someone actually thought about it and made those choices intentionally because they believed it was the best realization of their unique vision. But it's also true that the range of looks in today's content isn't as wide as it should be. There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project. Or the recent epidemic of 'HDR-flat' desaturation. We can and should strive to do better - to think and create different and deploy the full palette of expression we're so fortunate to finally have at our fingertips. I want to see and celebrate a broad range of expressively unique, creatively opinionated looks - even ones I don't personally care for - whether created in-camera, in grading or even purely in CGI.
I should also add that there's still an element of technical limitation driving some of this default to visual conservatism. Sadly, inconsistent (and sometimes just broken) HDR implementations across consumer viewing platforms is a frustrating issue and I sympathize with colorists and mastering engineers prepping content for literally 200 different distribution formats. While technically-based, these issues are all the more tragic because there's no underlying reason it had to be such a shit show of uneven implementation. HDR, wide color gamuts and deep color spaces are all well-specified and purely in the digital domain. High-quality digital processing and conversion is inexpensive and built into even cheap HDMI encoder chips so even the cheapest consumer displays with limited capabilities should be able to map content created with higher color spaces and wide dynamic ranges so that they still broadly represent the creator's intent. Yet too many still fail to properly handle mapping HDR and WCG content.
> I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
could a factor driving current monotone style be less about aesthetics and taste and more that we're all just cognitively exhausted?
everything is fighting for our attention because our attention has been monetized. so when something bland shows up, it simultaneously provides a bit of respite and can seem more 'trustworthy' because it isn't clamoring for your attention.
if i were buying some kitchen appliances and i had a choice between a brightly colored models or a stark, utilitarian models, i have to admit that the stark ones have appeal because they "look professional" (even though it may not actually be pro quality) and "the color is just a sales gimmick" (even though boring industrial grey is also a sales gimmick)
If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
> If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
My impression from the data is not that greyscale now dominates the physical environment, but that browns once dominated. Presumably because things like wood, copper, etc. once dominated the materials we engrossed ourselves in. As we've expanded the paints and other materials we live with, we've found much more balance.
Is that really true or isiit just that blues and greens biodegrade and so the only evidence of the past's colors we have is the mineral colors. We have evidence that paint has been used on wood furniture - but not what color was used.
I think the sensory load idea is productive, but I'd add a related idea of drawing attention to key things only.
I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.
But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.
Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.
When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.
(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)
I have a different take on interior wall colors: any shade too far off from white actually darkens the room no matter the color.
Paint colors subtractively from light: you never get more light into a room when you're knocking out wavelengths rather then reflecting them. Whereas with whiter walls you always have the option of manipulating color by using colored lighting.
Well, visually exhausting is something that imho happens only if you find unpleasant the colors you're seeing. The wonderful island of Burano is something I would never get tired of, yet it's so colorful.
I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that catch - and drain - our attention
I don't hate the wall art in your example... it's not quite my taste, but it doesn't make me pull my hair out. If you look at something like the link below, I'd hate having to be anywhere near it. Busy patterns and mixes of color just feel like noise and give me (sometimes literally) a headache.
This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
Love the phrasing. I found myself in the past few days getting in a pair of disputes in HN comments that may have boiled down reading the exaggerated adjectives literally, when the authors may not have intended that.
> If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
Pretty much every retail store is like this. I mean, it's been this way for a while, but there is so much loud colorful advertizing that having a quiet place to live in feels much better.
The example they use of Baroque art actually perfectly demonstrates this. It primarily consists of neutral tones that integrate well with the blues and muted oranges woven through it. Not exactly riotous color, as they put it - but very similar to the use of color you see both in modern designs and older cultural traditions.
(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.
Isn't all that art faded out, though? I wouldn't be surprised if Baroque period art was originally painted with riotous color first and then faded over time to where it now looks merely like an "opinionated use of color".
In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.
I just searched for some colorised Roman statues and they don't seem to be overusing color. Even complex designs might be basically three colors (e.g. red, blue and white, plus with brown hair and eyes), and the colors themselves are a bit muted. I guess the have been painted based on modern interpretations of the original colors based on whatever limited evidence remains, so maybe those aren't the original colors, but it doesn't seem like a 1990s era website or a garish collection of first gen iMacs and iBooks.
Yes and, part of it is advertising visually tormenting us. They throw uber catchy colorful banners of stuff we're often not interested in the slightest, doing everything to get our attention. Also, websites featuring advertisement are encouraged to have more muted tones so they stand out. That gets tiresome and we tend to want rest for private spaces.
But overall I agree. If everything is uber-colorful, that can become just overwhelming. Also we are a lot more stimulated throughout the day with screen and movies and games. In the olden days you didn't have a smartphone with a colorful screen, so putting lots of colour in your house or your church made more sense.
I'd want less advertisement, and more thoughtful color choices throughout cities and digital spaces.
Whatever colour you put on the wall at home, you get used to. Your senses acclimatize to it because you see it all the time, even if it initially seemed "riotous".
Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.
Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
Even if it's in one's own living space it's possible to not get used to something. In those cases, for those types of personalities, it'll usually get replaced or painted over. One thing I completely abhor are busy tile patterns, it can be the shapes or colors, and no, I wouldn't get used to it.
In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.
Then what happens, if you're that type of person, after you've replaced or painted over something? Do you relax and become comfortable with what's left? Or do you move on to the next irritant, that will bug you until you've replaced or painted over that?
I saw some pictures from a house where everything was white. The walls were white, the tables and chairs were white, the pillows were white, lamps were white, etc. But I bet the owner didn't see it as everything being white, like I did. I bet that when they'd look at the same pictures, they'd see all the little details here and there that were not white, or not quite white enough. I imagine them being in a constant state of stress over the non-white blemishes.
I don't know them, I just saw the pictures, so I don't truly know how they feel, I could be just imagining things. But my gut feeling is that someone with a home like that is not at ease with themselves.
For your example, probably. Different people will have different compulsive behaviors. I painted my kitchen cabinets shortly after moving in... I didn't do the best job of it, and I do notice the blemishes, inconsistencies and bleed through as well as a few spots that chipped over the last 6 years or so. Not enough that I stress over it, or even really think about it in general, but recognize.
I don't think I'd ever want something all that monochrome for myself. To me, subdued isn't about monochrome so much as limiting the noise. I don't even mind a sharp contrast, such as a colorful photo/painting. It's what I can only describe as visual noise that gets me. Especially with patterns that aren't really something you'd see in nature.
> Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I disagree. The 60s through the 80s had a wide color palette with extremely good design. Early 1900s too. Heck even the Greek statues were extremely colorful.
You're right, modern design often favors neutral bases with pops of color.
However, if everyone followed that same "modern taste," everything would look alike. Just as the technicolor era had its appeal, so do bold color palettes.
The best approach depends on the desired effect and overall design.
There's definitely a cultural component to "modern taste". South Asian cultures have a preference for warm tones and many vibrant colors. East Asian cultures from developing and developed countries these days have lots of cool tones and monotone aesthetics. While I found the article a bit short on the "why", I do agree that the West has had a philosophical disdain for color from the Industrial era.
You can see the same thing in music recordings during the 60s. Stereo and quadrophonic sound was new so everything was panned all over the place really hard. Drums all on the left, vocals hard right etc. It's an interesting effect sometimes, but generally a gimmick and/or distraction. We don't really do that anymore, for good reason.
I don't think we stopped doing it because it's gimmicky.
Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.
Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.
So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.
IIRC, the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album was among the first stereo-mixed albums released. As much fame as that particular album has, the original mix is really bad. Drums all left, guitars all right, nothing in the center. It sounds weird to modern ears!
Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.
One of the reasons being that more people had mono systems so the stereo mixdown was just kind of a "for fun" afterthought. They didn't take it as seriously.
Even worse is when they keep screwing with the panning. I can't stand Led Zeppelin II for that reason. Someone just couldn't stop messing with the damn slider, right in the middle of songs. The ones with merely bad, but static, panning are far more tolerable.
I've heard this is a recommended paradigm for mixing, to only ever pan things R, C, L and nothing in between, but it doesn't make sense to me. Possible because i have to mix on headphones, but it sounds much too extreme to me. Sure, _some things_ can go all the way but i generally enjoy to fill the space between the far edges, and allow some reverb busses to blur the lines a bit if needed.
Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down
That’s totally not true. The original stereo patent from the 1930s is based on M+S signals, not separate channels, and was born out of a desire to position sound across a stage (movies).
By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.
Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.
I mean... ish? There is something to be said for a minimal styling, but there is clearly an aesthetic change to things. As an easy example, wallpaper used to be far more common, and was often far more busy than the neutral colors people insist on in homes nowadays. Not just more colorful, but with designs on them.
You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.
I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
Fuck modern taste. I have a bedroom where the walls and bedding are deep blue and it's accented with neutral colors. There's another room which is a rich shade of purple. Doing without bold use of color isn't tasteful, it's just boring.
I think technology certainly had an effect. I remember pre-2008, the design trends were mostly centered around pushing the boundaries in terms of software capabilities. For example shiny/translucent 'pill buttons' became insanely popular as image editors became good at creating rounded corners and gradients with alpha transparency and layering them... Then eventually the trend became minimalist with a focus on simpler shapes and colors and larger fonts to make interfaces look less cluttered.
I think the duller colors we see nowadays has something to do with the ongoing minimalism trend. Minimalism is seen as professional-looking. Unfortunately, now we have the problem that brands struggle to differentiate themselves because any overly creative design risks coming across as 'unprofessional'. The balance of 'appearing unique' and 'appearing professional' has shifted towards the latter.
In a broader sense, it reflects society's shift towards increased centralization and conformity and an intolerance towards outliers.
Why is Taco Bell slowly losing color like a vampire is draining it of fun and blood? I see these driving around and I just shake my head, what about light purple and white represents Mexican culture and food? It's the whitest thing they could do without making the sign all white. Same thing with Target. Now some of the logos are white on white!
No thank you. I prefer rich colors, they consistently make world look a more lively place, the more the better. There is some getting used to of course, but it doesn't normalize at the same bottom that sea of grey/white/black is.
I hate this with passion with cars - sea of grey in western Europe. Heck, both of our cars are grey - we always buy used ones and there was simply no other option that wasn't 10k more expensive for params we wanted and were willing to pay. It looks bland, boring, unimaginative. One of top reasons why buy new - one can actually choose something nicer.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over India and boy do they use crazy intense colors all over and everywhere including clothing - orange, purple, pink, very bright, both men and women. A very, very nice visual experience one doesn't get used to. Then coming back to western civilization where literally everybody dresses in black or dark grey during winter. Its just sad view, like winter with low amount of sunlight isn't depressing enough, no lets add some more monotonous colors.
As an Indian living in a western European country - I very much prefer the gray/ neutral colors here. I always found the excessive and ugly use of color in India overwhelming. Though, I agree, a bit of more colors in winter wear would be nice.
That misrepresents Technicolor. The 3-film process was adopted in the 1930s. It was the most popular, but not first, incarnation of Technicolor.
Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.
The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."
Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
"Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone."
What a load of crap. Where do you live, in a cave? have you ever been in a jungle perhaps? what about birds with colorful feathers? you want to wash out those colors too? jesus, nature dictates and nature is full of vivid colors. so your argument goes down the drain.
there is no such thing as modern taste. there are trends dictated by a handful of psychotic gatekeepers who got hooked on their own farts.
old movies had the absolute best coloring. compare those movies to the ones seen now and you are on the verge of retching. these superficial, devoid of human value superprocessed heaps of shit they try to force feed to people, just plain unwatchable. not just the story lacks, it has zero message, nothing to chew on, just some brainwashing action scenes. that's good for the plebs they say while squeezing people for money.
absolutely reprehensible, that a handful of gatekeepers put people into these literal psycho gardens that is devoid of anything resembling human. what's missing is the human part. the humanity is slowly missing from everything.
Jungles are actually a great example. They are mostly neutral browns and dark greens that form a pretty neutral background... with the occasional beautiful bright accent colors from a bird or flower or something. But if you trek through the jungle, it's pretty boring color-wise most of the time. Which is why spotting a colorful bird is such a joy.
But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.
I don't think anyone would argue the point of cars is to look pretty or make the environment more balanced. Cars are successful in spite of looking like shit and damaging the environment.
the history of cars in the US is pretty complicated tbh. most major cities had street cars and rail systems for a long time before major government initiatives ripped them out in favor of highways and streets. I'm not sure cars would be as popular without that major push towards car-centric infrastructure.
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
Another thing that might also play a role is this styling trend of vehicles looking "meaner" and more and more aggressive. This was discussed[1] a bit on HN a while ago. Bright colors don't really match the "My vehicle is going to punch you in the face" styling (for cars and especially trucks) that has become popular.
I'd say farm equipment has embraced the same "meaner" trend, but has also doubled down on bright, vibrant colours.
Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still.
That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this year and gone the next, so if you have one of those no-longer-available colours it sticks out like a sore thumb as looking old. Which is what I believe the consumer truly fears – owning a car that looks old and dated.
The blacks and whites have remained consistently available, so it is far less risky.
Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.
Literally every vehicle seems to have that diagonal line incorporated somewhere. I mean the one generally near the windows that slopes downward as it moves towards the front of the car, regardless of the general shape of the car itself.
I assume you mean the line near the handles on this Corolla [1]? That whole part of the car is doing a lot of different things.
1. Flat vertical panels are a no-no. Adding creases increases buckling resistance.
2. That's a hugely important area for cabin noise because the side mirrors cause turbulence and the vehicle body needs a channel to constrain the turbulent flow and flex as little as possible near the door seals.
3. The skin needs to expand outwards from the line of the pillars to fit the window mechanisms, the handles/locks, and the side impact protection without intruding into the cabin space.
4. It makes the car look more sporty and interesting. The technical term for the crease itself is "character line", and it's the main reason why the Corolla has one. It's visual reinforcement for the modern standard combo of low hoods-high trunks that's considered attractive styling.
5. The greenhouse (cabin) narrows towards the top for rollover safety and aerodynamic reasons (a.k.a tumblehome), and this needs to blend with the rest of the body in a visually appealing way. The cybertruck is a good example of how unusual it can look if this is just a straight line on the body. Here's a comparison between the current design and an ai-generated "rounded" design [2] [3].
Not sure which diagonal line you mean but I expect some creases are added for structural reasons, so the large areas of the metal are rigid, not floppy.
> Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by.
Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed or something. Recall that the 90s were still pretty colorful in regards to clothing here in the US. And then just a couple of years later people here were all starting to wear those greys, charcoals and black.
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
I enjoyed Midsommar's overuse of orange/teal because it really led to the feeling that the viewer was on a psychedelic trip (which usually comes with oversaturating of reds and orange.) Agree that Marvel is doing a lot of trend chasing in its color grading.
> Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though
Apple really drops the ball on colors in 99% of their products. You have the iMac and.... oh wait, that's it. There are no real colors on the pro phones and even the non-pro phones looks like something that got 1 of 10 coats of color. And then the MBPs have a handful of shades of gray, I would totally buy a green or blue MBP if there was one.
> I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars
This. If you look at the cars, pretty much the only "stock" bright color is red. I used to drive a grass green car (vinyl wrap), and it stood out everywhere.
I wish car makers offered more color options by default.
Almost all car makers offer bright colours by default. In my driveway is a bright blue Subaru (it was hard to pick between the blue and eye-searing orange) and a bright copper coloured Suzuki. Mazda is becoming famous for their innovative colour options. Google "Nissan Micra colours" to see what even Japan's most conservative carmaker offers to those who care to look.
On selected models only :( E.g. Ford doesn't offer anything brighter than muted red on their Escape vehicles. They do have brightly-colored Mustangs, but nothing else.
Even Mazda doesn't offer them for all their vehicles.
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
awesome insight. i've heard this referred to as the "site merchandising" problem. There are some products that are there to attract people / give them a choice, but they don't sell themselves.
Reminiscent of halo cars in the automotive industry. Fancy flagship vehicles produced to show off the brand and bring attention (to their other vehicles), but not necessarily to become profit makers themselves.
Yeah, my theory was that the yellow ones caught people's eye since it stood out from the visual clutter, but yellow isn't anyone's favorite color, so you end up buying blue or red...
As someone who's own{s|ed} 2 yellow cars (A Mercedes SLK230 and a Mustang MachE) This makes me sad. I've also owned 3 red cars and one blue one so my color choices aren't exactly in line with the sales data.
In fact, there is demand for colorful products. However, the way businesses measure demand today is through the aggregate unit demand. In effect, you get the lowest common denominator products rising to the top, and people with specific preferences can't get at their desired products. If instead, businesses would measure demand at a more granular level, they'd see this and be able to better serve their customers.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
I think it goes one layer further, everyone is worried that everyone else is worried that colors don't sell. "I like this used bright pink Honda, but I'm worried no one else will buy it if I want to sell so I'm not going to buy it"
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
Cars are not buy it for life items. I generally buy a 3 year old car because it is about half the price of a new one - but I'm limited to what color I can find. If I bought new cars I could get whatever color - except that new car buyers won't be seen in a 4 year old car, and they can only afford to upgrade (to the extent they can) if the car has resale value so they care about what color they (the dealer) thinks will sell.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
If you buy new and drive for live you are a minority and so manufacturers (and banks via loans) won't make that type of thing that sell you but don't have perceived resale. If you buy newish used and keep for life you are stuck with what they think you will buy.
I'm on my 16th year with my Jetta, bought new. For appearances I should probably buy a new car (it's totaled), but I'm pretty sure it will last another 16 years and will only be replaced out of necessity (were I to have a family) or vanity (were I to have a midlife crisis). I've worked from home or commuted by bicycle most of the time I've owned it so I've averaged < 8,000 miles per year.
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
A long time ago I adopted a personal style of wearing bright colors. I have simple good fitting t-shirts in all colors. Glasses in blue and red. Shoes in yellow. Sandals in green. Jackets in orange. You get the idea.
It's always easy to make an outfit that goes together and makes a good impression. Men's Japanese and European fashion brands work well with this choice. I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I've found that it's very disarming and engaging; even though I'm over 6'3" and a big guy with a tight hair cut, I'm almost never perceived as a threat. I'm a natural introvert, but it seems to make approachability easier. Since having a kid, and him growing into a toddler, I think it helps there too. It's just more fun. Strong recommend.
>I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I can't speak to Amsterdam, but it's commonly said that the way you know Americans in Paris is that they're wearing bright colors. The navy blue suit is almost a uniform for professional Parisian men.
I do something very similar! Just mix and match. Never really looks bad IMO; and anyone who disagrees hasn't said so yet… and their opinion probably doesn't matter anyway!
> According to major auto paint suppliers, more than 80% of new cars are now grayscale. Black, white, gray, and silver dominate the roads. Reds, blues, and greens in auto production are increasingly rare.
This is biased data: when cars that are not white or black cost 1000 of euros more from the factory, and custom non-preselected colors even more, then people tend to but the cheap colors.
Especially when they are corporate lease cars and the corporation doesn’t care about the color.
If car companies want more color, do not charge for it.
Gen Z is rejecting this "millennial bland" aesthetic of turning all spaces into an Apple store. Just one reason I appreciate and look forward to the coming generation. Take a look at some of their trends in art, music, fashion, graphic design... plenty of color to be found.
When computers were beige, they went all in on color to stand out. When everything started being more colorful, they moved to white and then grey/silver. Now that everything is grey/silver, they're moving to gold/rose.
As an elder millennial, words cannot express how much I despise "Millennial Gray." When I was househunting for my current house, it was depressing how much was out there, because a brand-new gray kitchen, bath, or floor is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Paint I can paint over, but yuck.
I specifically bought a "millennial gray" apartment and put bland furniture: it's mostly white, black, and brown. The twist is that I'm putting colorful decorations, so that when you enter my living room, your eyes ignore all the "functional" items, and focus on decorative items, because these are colorful. It's like those video games where environment is grey but interactive objects are lit.
Only the living room has any colors. Bedroom and bathroom are as boring as can be, so that you do your shit, don't get distracted, and get back to the living room.
I've heard that before. Supposedly gen X (which I'm a part of) was rejecting the bland colors of their baby boomer parents back when we were in our 20s. I don't know what happened.
- Brown is an extremely warm color, and sucks up all of the ugly blues from unnatural light sources
- Brown pairs well with all sorts of shades and colors, just like the millennial gray and white tones
- Brown can come in all sorts of shades and vibrancies, but is not as stimulating as other colors
- Brown hides dirt, scuffs, and stains extremely well
Humans have spent most of our history being very familiar with the color brown in our natural world. I moved from a modern home (everything in white and grays) and into a 1920s brown home with brown-beige walls and all of its original brown wood accents and fixtures. And then I stuffed it with brown furniture. Not only is it beautiful and cozy, I swear that this was the first year I didn't suffer from seasonal affective disorder in a long time.
Reminds me of the "ugliest color"[1], the brown Pantone 448 C, selected for use on tobacco products in an attempt to dissuade purchase. However it turned out to be quite nice looking on packages[2], and at last here in Norway lead to no measurable decrease in sales[3].
A lot of this stuff is just designers imitating each other. You see this a lot in web design where every website uses similar colors, fonts, visual language etc. I've worked with a few good designers that do actual original design where the point is to be different in a tasteful way. Standing out from the grey masses. If you get a lot of people copying each other, it all averages out to the same bland/boring stuff.
A lot of Hollywood productions these days are sequels, re-runs, and endless variations of successful movies. Down to copying stylistic elements, color grading, etc.
I love Tim Burton and Wes Anderson as directors. Both use vibrant, saturated colors and have a very recognizable style. Tim Burton uses lush, saturated colors to portray suburbs (many of his movies feature lush green lawns white picket fences, etc.).
And Wes Anderson has his famous style of exactly centered subjects,using a lot of surrealist visuals, and elaborate sets and models. I loved the little Roald Dahl thing he did on Netflix two years ago or so (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) where all of this was on display. If you haven't seen that, worth a watch.
Part of this that affects me is interior decorations in the age of RGB LED lighting. If your home interior is white, you can cast any color onto it from an RBG light, but if your interior paint has a non-greyscale hue, coloring it with LED lights produces unexpected results that are inconsistent with other areas of the house that are painted other colors.
Another part that affects me is being colorblind. When I was in elementary school I was mocked for wearing one blue sock and one purple sock, something that I was unaware that I was doing. I began wearing less color because at least I could be confident that I wasn't mismatching my clothes. But then in high school I was mocked for always wearing greyscale clothes because "what are you, colorblind or something?"
My son (11 years old) always wears mismatched socks. Even when we match them in his drawer he will unmatch them (we no longer bother). I'm not sure if style has changed or he just isn't old enough to care what girls think.
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that people respond well to unusual styles as long as you wear it with confidence. For example, I sometimes wear a pocket watch when I dress up. It's not in vogue or anything, but I think they're cool and I don't really care whether or not anyone else does. The funny thing is, I've had multiple people tell me that they appreciate my pocket watch thing. I think maybe people are attracted to authenticity, when someone has the confidence to do their own thing for their own sake rather than worrying about others' opinions.
As adults that is true, but in high school perceived peer pressure is important and so most kids act like their peers. (there are a number of different groups in most schools and they are not a like, but you pick yours and belong to it)
It's true as a kid too, it's just that a lot of kids haven't learned the lesson yet. One of the most important lessons you can learn when you're young is to disregard peer pressure.
One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works."
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
> the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.
I think you really start to see the fetishization of the Greeks and Romans in the Neoclassicism movements in the 18th century as an aesthetic, and I'm actually not sure how much was known about the actual Greek and Roman lifestyles (Roman, in particular - a big lot of this is tied up with the notions of Empire) at the time.
Maybe not “the Greeks” broadly, but Spartans specifically are equated with austerity to the extent that “spartan” is adopted as an adjective meaning “showing indifference to comfort and luxury”.
"Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class."
I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
That's just upmarket-priced vendors using influencers to advertise.
You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.
You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
Wild. Because that is one of the first, most heavily color graded films I can recall. Theoden's coming out from under the spell of Saruman is the most hit-you-ver-the-head use of color-grading that I can think of. (And, perhaps in a fantasy film it's fine.)
Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
Sample size of two, but when I went to Costa Rica and then China, I did not get the sense that color was going out of fashion in either place. Indeed it seemed jarring how cOLorFuL everything was. But after a week I got used to it.
It's a cute article, but I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. I suspect it is much more a collection of unrelated reasons:
* Historical objects in museums are likely more colorful because we cared to preserve the most visually striking objects. Classic survivorship bias.
* Music has less dynamic range than in early recordings because producers were competing to be the loudest sounding song on the radio (see "loudness wars"). Those wars are actually over now and dynamic range has been increasing for about a decade.
* There is a whole lot going on behind trends in cinematographer color grading if you look into that world. But in the example here, I think it's largely that audiences expected "muted brown" as the color grade to send a "period film" signal. Witness also how every medieval or fantasy movie feels compelled to have all of the castle walls bare gray rock when they were in fact plastered and brightly colored. Likewise Roman architecture being alabaster white. Audiences wouldn't believe a Roman movie with painted statues or a fantasy film with colorful castle walls.
* Cars have muted colors because consumers moved towards a model where they sell cars every few years. When purchasing a car, they choose neutral colors to maximize resale value. Also, I think cars are simply much less a part of someone's social identity and status symbol and more of a utilitarian object than they they used to be. (Witness that when people buy expensive sports cars, those are more likely to be brightly colored.)
* Interior design trends come and go, but I think one of the drivers of gray walls was that it became a popular style for Airbnb rentals to avoid turning off potential renters. That led it to become associated with internationalism and modernity, and from there it sort of took off. Also, an increasing number of people are renting and are simply unable to paint their walls more interesting colors.
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.
To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:
> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).
whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:
> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.
The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?
Am I the only one who thought the lead photo should have included Gen 1 iMac vs. latest lineup? Even the 2021 anodized aluminum version is comparatively muted!
Going through my junk box the other day I found a USB to two port RS-232 converter from that era - that came with 4 colorful snap on front pieces to match your iMac.
My wife convinced me that we should buy a dark gray car cause it would be less obviously dirty. I deeply regret not trying harder to convince her back, so we'd get a bright red or yellow one instead. It's super hard to find the car back on a parking lot and who cares when it's dirty? Bright colors are nice. I'm now trying to compensate by only buying colorful clothing going forward.
You can buy vinyl wrap for cheap and DIY install is possible. (professional install is expensive). I'm not sure how good they are, but it is your best option if you want color.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
"Millennial Gray" is a somewhat derogatory term that describes the interior decorating in many people's homes. It seems to be a generational thing. I think color will come back as Gen Z and Gen Alpha get older and become more dominant in the economy.
> Baroque art stands in direct defiance of the chromophobic worldview. It doesn’t strip down experience in the name of order, but rather builds it up — embracing sensation and structure together.
All I can say is that if it is not baroque, do not fix it.
When it comes to things like cars and room interiors, neutral colors have a much better resale value because they appeal to people more widely. For cars, vibrant colors might mean higher insurance rates (red cars are associated with sports cars, young drivers and aggressive driving).
That is the general perception with Red and Orange which can cost more to insure.
There are other factors with car colour:
- Visibility: white and yellow are more visible and get a premium discount.
- Fleet ownership: which mostly means white.
The amount of grey manufactured at the moment is interesting as they attract a higher premium because they are basically the same colour as the road. Black is also deemed less visible.
I prefer things with low color contrast in general, just to leave some color space for important things. Maybe this preference stems from the time I tweak color themes in IDEs.
In contrast, I also found more and more photography pieces which show vibrant colors and high color contrasts.
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
> Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time
This is driven in part by a shift towards mobile screens and the compression in visual space. Even on the desktop the favicon has an influence with this deconstruction.
> it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time.
Because buying anything not in the standard white/black/corporate gray is easily an extra thousand euros on top of the car price. Red is still sometimes offered as standard color.
It would be nice if cars came in Hot Wheels Spectraflame. I’m sure the greigification of automobiles is down to some spreadsheet somewhere showing them they save two nickels for offering one less color.
Maybe only on surfaces. Lighting has become very colorful.
Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.
American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.
Does this attempt to normalize for the possible case that colour is overrepresented in older art because pigments were so precious? Do we see a lot more purple represented than we should have expected to if we went further back than 1800? And as it became cheaper, it’s less novel and less interesting to utilize?
I wonder if seeing the world through digital screens had any effect on this.
Biologically, color drives behavior. Exposure to the same color palette over time develops tolerance, so *different* colors might be perceived as more attractive.
I believe each individual is unique in their color perception and emotional response, but there's obviously a shared social aspect of it too.
That said, it's interesting to see the young generation's artistic preferences, which reminds me of 90's for some reason :)
The chart with car colors has been famous for a few years. However I'm seeing an inverse trend in past 1-2 years (at least in France); new cars are getting very colorful. For example:
- Renault Clio is very popular in metallic orange
- Renault 5 e-tech in bright yellow and green
- MG in aqua/azure blue
- Peugeot 208 in dark yellow and blue and dark red
Is there a case to be made for 'well, that's what we had the most colour of...', with regards to manufacturers...of the paint, that'll sell it cheap, just to get rid?
Well, if you went to Spain to the Castilles/Aragon, specially to the Serranía Celtibérica area, you would find the same rural emptiness of the US. And, in Asturias/Cantabria/Palencia, at "Picos de Europa", you woudn't believe that these spikey, rough mountains with hard winters belong to Spain.
I loath the lack of vibrancy in modern design and fashion. So dull, so boring, so agreeable. Thankfully it allows people who do have a bit of personality to easily stand out if they want to. Still waiting a red MacBook pro
I’ve certainly noticed this in film and interior design (most AirBnBs will have a familiar grayscale palette), but the opposite trend has occurred in software. Windows 2000 was far less colorful than Windows 10, which in turn had a more saturated palette than Vista and Windows 7.
And Windows 11 is significantly less colourful again. Also, you're missing out the most colourful version of all - Windows XP!
(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)
My small victory is to set the tv on a wider color space, and so make youtube more vivid. 5% of things will look a little strange, but the majority looks more beautiful. Note you actually need a modern tv with a REAL wide color space.
the car color thing may be real, but also it may be that people went overboard with color because they could, and then color got boring.
For the percent of colors in photos, i m not sure. Older technologies oversaturated colors and probably underrepresented greys (or turned them to red/green) , but maybe newer photo technologies allowed more blues and greys.
The cinema thing is real and very annoying to the point where i have to oversaturate all my screens in order to stop seeing actors' faces as corpses.
Why is nobody talking about how Car Insurance is typically higher with any real colour selections? Insurance companies calculate that vehicles with certain colours (for example, Red) have a higher statistical probability of being in a collision than say... grey. This has created a downward pressure for people who would like colours in their vehicles, but would instead prefer to just pay less in car insurance since they may be aware of this aspect.
I for one don't like that car insurance companies do this, but this very likely is a huge reason why fewer people buy vehicles with colour beyond Grey/etc.
Can't speak for the US, but having built a few versions of a car insurance comparison tool for a popular Australian comparison site; colour was a factor used by a few insurers: yellow & white getting a discount; grey, black, dark green costing more. WHile red and orange are perceived as being sporty, factors such as a driver under 30 with a Nissan 300ZX, WRX or a V8 would blow out a premium far more and some insurers wouldn't even take the risk.
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.
I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.
"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.
Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."
Wait, his "graph" measures a greater gamut of colors in photos from the nineteenth century when they were all B/W? Who's still buying this retvrn hucksterism?
Current photos of old objects. I admit I had the same question based on the caption included in the graph itself, which just says "photos."
> a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
Yeah you're right, I jumped the gun there. On the other hand, color trends of science museum exhibits are a cherry-picked example. "Culture Critic"'s whole shtick is to put a photo of a modernist building next to an ornamental one, and this just seems to be that, but with a superficial layer of scientism.
Personally I think the collection used is pretty good, not perfect but not cherry picking. I find CC's explanation unsatisfactory and loose, mostly placing the blame on philosphers that predate the recent trend of less color by decades or millennia, and skipping over well known major events in the history of color fashion. But I do agree that ornamentation and color are less common today in architecture and product design than they were in prior decades, and than they were for much of history. Except perhaps for a narrow band of blue.
The loss of color is concerning, but something I find interesting is the image the author chooses to illustrate Loos' quote, "We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." I would argue the building pictured falls short of this goal in important ways. A lot of contemporary architecture lacks the modernist commitment to flat planes, pure volumes, etc. and adds lazy and useless decorative/textural elements. The building pictured would look better if it was less adorned! (But even better with some color)
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
"The answer isn’t just about fashion or materials, but is rooted in a much older understanding of the relationship between color and truth."
Nah it's just fashion and materials. Even if you just look at apples product line, you can see they went from colorful plastic to monochrome metal and glass to how reintroducing colors to several of their product lines.
People want so badly for there to be underlying, global conspiracy that they see it everywhere.
Not sure it's worth a whole blog post, but I think we have more ways to express ourselves than ever... the color hasn't gone, it's moved.
I might resell my house or my car but my PC is a like looking into a rainbow supernova. My clothes have patterns and prints that weren't even technically possible 100 years ago. I can go buy paint for my walls at any hardware store that would cost a fortune during the renaissance. I can print any artwork I want at home at amazing quality or pay a little more for an even better pro print. I've got a number of screens in my house that can reproduce more colors than I can differentiate.
The world is more colorful than ever, I don't think we have to point to the tired car examples or temporary trends in home decoration or filmmaking and claim something's missing.
What I find infuriating is to see colors stripped from children’s toys and clothes, especially by Northern Europe brands. Those dull beige taupe tones might attract parents but I’m sure that they bring little joy and stimulation to children.
Adolf Loos designed some incredibly sumptuous interiors. They aren't lacking in color. Methinks he's being used unjustly as a scapegoat to grind some axe. To me, this essay is an example of "slop."
To double down on that notion—the baroque rococo interiors that the author idolises at the end were the exclusive purview of the astonishingly wealthy, in no small part because of how expensive they were to implement. Accordingly they were equated with absolutism and corruption.
It's hard to decide how much of the author's position is born from ignorance versus how much of it is born from disingenuousness.
Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.
In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.
I play boardgames. I am also visually imppaired. So for me functionality is a massive issue. Readability is a massive issue. Being "pretty" is not an issue.
In this class of games, it's common for a game to be printed, possibly have several printings, and then go out of print. For particularly sticky games, they may come back with a reprint or redesign years later. And I've noticed going back decades that the redesign almost always replaces bold, functional, high-contrast designs for low-contrast, "realistic", "pretty' designs. Examples:
- Brass: original [1] vs redesign [2]
- Titan: original [3] vs redesign [4]
- Saint Petersburg: original [5] vs redesign [6]
I don't know why this is but part of it comes down to people wanting to add "value" by changing things rather than just reprinting them. But why go "realistic"? I think there's a pervasive idea in this space that "realism" is good. So that's a trend.
Cars go beyond color. Cars become a white or other neutral color because it's the least potentially "offensive". Car makers want the largest possible market. Plus companies like Hertz want this kind of car. But look at cars from the 1950s through 1980s and on top of color you have a lot of cosmetic design choices that we don't have now because they're less aerodynamic but, more importantly, cheaper.
In a way, the car ceased to become an object of expression. Instead for many people it's just pure utility. So the designs became utilitarian. You may disagree because people are very opinionated on what cars they prefer but I think that just expresses brand preferences not aesthetic choices.
Chain restaurants also exhibit this trend. Compare McDonald's from the 1980s vs now. A lot of fast food restaurants are now much harder to distinguish.
Do you have original and redesign mixed up on Brass? 1's ID is much higher than 2's, not sure if BGG does sequential IDs but I think I've noticed in the past that they seem to.
Either way, I'd never even consider buying 1 (the redesign?), it's nearly impossible to "read" that board, while 2 (the original?) looks immediately inviting, without being at-all ugly.
Colors aren’t cool. You know what’s cool? Clean perfect lines, rich texture and materials. Imagine a cube of polished concrete stone, with a wood plank sanded and stained to a warm perfection, basking in the glow of a square window at a perfect 45 degree angle. Beautiful, it can move you to tears.
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
I've been interested in the subconscious emotional response to colour for a long time now and have a kind of autistic obsession with the colour selections of myself and others (especially the colour of clothes). None of what I'm about to say is backed up by any reading or research I've done on this topic. This is all my opinion and experience, but I guess its somewhat topical and some people might find it interesting.
Many years back I used to practice social skills and pickup. I realised quite quickly while learning how to socialise that colour is one of the more important ways to alter how others perceive you prior to knowing you.
Specifically, greys and blacks were generally a bad choice and tended to signal low-confidence or a lack of character. There is an exception here for formal wear, but generic fashion choices like a black tshirt, grey shorts and black shoes will make you look devoid of personality. Always try to wear some colour if dressing casually and if you want to appear more friendly soft blues, greens and pinks I think are some of the most inviting colours.
Hot pink was one of my favourite colours to cautiously add when socialising as a guy in a casual setting because it can be quite an interesting colour choice. It's far less aggressive than a strong red, but almost equally as striking. And its purpose is more confusing (and therefore interesting) than other colours since it could both be a sign of a confident heterosexual guy, or an outwardly gay guy. For this reason I've found hot pink is a good colour to add if meeting girls in a casual setting because it can be initially sexually neutralising while also an indicator of confidence (being too sexually forward is generally a bad strategy).
However, in a formal settings whites and blacks are generally what you'll want to go with. Beige colours can also work, but might make you look a bit old fashioned today. I thought the reaction Jordan Peterson got when he starting wearing very colourful and striking suits was interesting because it confirmed a lot of my speculation around how people view colour in formal wear. It's very, very difficult to balance class with colour. If you want to appear classy it's almost required that you stick with whites and blacks.
I personally suspect the world is losing colour because of the above two points – we associate class with neutral colours (blacks and whites generally) and strong colours can impose strong emotional responses which we might want to avoid (generally speaking anyway).
My guess is that if you saw a brightly coloured home or car you will have a sense that the person who owns that thing has a lack of class and a strong colour might even suggest something negative or unintended about the owner. For this reason you might be tempted to just stick with something neutral to avoid this. This would be especially true for colourful items of low value because creating a strong emotional reaction around an item of little value it's probably going be perceived as overwhelmingly negative. Hence why some teen driving fast in a bright red but inexpensive car can be aggravating, while someone else driving fast in a bright red Ferrari while not especially classy is still likely to be far less negatively perceived.
And beyond the class aspect, I'd suspect the lack of colour we see today is a reflection of our lower self-confidence both as individuals and culturally. I suspect people increasingly don't want to stand out or make an impression in public, and culturally in the West we're less confident and perhaps don't believe our public buildings deserve to be as striking or grand as they were in the past.
I don't really know why blacks and whites suggest class either. I suspect that's a cultural thing that could change, but perhaps that would first require us to be confident enough to make an emotional impression. Perhaps too much confidence is viewed as unclassy today, while being timid and softly spoken is generally seen more positively. Either way, even if you believe the world should be more colourful, I wouldn't suggest leading the way on that in your own life – at least not if you care about how others will perceive you.
> The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
I get this feeling when I visit certain places with beton brute architecture, and I always wonder what kind of suffering did the architect go through to design something like that?
Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.
It's not "losing" color.
At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media since the 1800s. You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease, but one does not exist. At least, the "explosion" the data shows is a very minor increase that does not affect the overall pattern.
The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.
The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.
Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.
So do you have actual own data to counter this?
If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.)
Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.
Yeah I'm pretty skeptical of that visualisation anyway. It sure looks like there's more grey scale, but that's because they've grouped it all at the top. If you actually look at the pixels in the below "white" a lot of them are very dark and unsaturated too.
I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
The data shows an explosion of "new" colours in the 1960s, although the trend never stopped. Technology is still no doubt the answer – including the explosion in the black to white spectrum. We aren't limited to natural colours or colours, period, like we once were.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.
The big difference between 1800s and the 1960s is that oil paints were mixed “onsite” for color and the the 1960s had the commcerialization of latex paints and Pantone colors.
I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.
Geocities were explosion of color.
Also, pop art.
> But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
This is meaningless.
"When many things are different, everything is the same".
Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing.
"000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because in the second sequence they're different and in the first they're all the same? Great, you just discovered sets and the axiom of choice.
We are literally discussing the difference within the sets! Obviously the second sequence is more diverse.
First, I thought your argument was going somewhere but then it took this turn.
I would agree with the first part and then argue that before the synthetics-revolution things were mostly just shades of browns(which is a type of dark unsaturated orange). Except for the upper classes who could afford the expensive colors. Now that color is cheap and normalized, it lost (some) of its allure. Not being able to signal your wealth anymore.
Now adding just a conjecture of mine; Now that 'clean' is still somewhat more expensive(upper classes still being able to afford more cleanliness by using other peoples labor), minimal textures(not literal textures but design-wise) are more attractive because it displays your wealth. Plain-white being the easiest to see blemishes on. With black being easier look unblemished. Also, 'tasteful' color arrangements will still signal your class somewhat due to requiring cultural knowledge.
I'm going to change your first example. Can you see what stands out?
"00000000qq000000000I0000000"
Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?
"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"
Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.
But you're contrasting chaotic use of many different colors with neutrality, and arguing for environments with very little color rather than well-coordinated color; you argued above that color was just one element along with size, shape, texture etc., as if these qualities were mutually exclusive and design should only emphasize one at any given time.
Well yes, in practice color often is chaotic. Nobody is color-coordinating the cars in the road, or the houses on a street, or the signs and advertisements and billboards. It's a free-for-all that turns into garish noise.
And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
I don't want to live in a bland environment hoping some random colorful person will walk in to accent it, though.
I would describe it more as noise... When there are loud, clashing color patterns everywhere, it all turns into noise and nothing really stands out. It's like watching analog TV with poor reception... there's stuff there, but really hard to make out or focus.
I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.
Modern SCADA systems are designed like this too. They used to be a riot of programmer art in primary colours, with most things blinking at any one time. Now they’re grey-on-grey for anything “nominal” with alarms in orange or red. Far less migraine inducing and far easier to see the important things.
> Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not.
It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
> When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
Why not? Different colors stand out. Even gray on black does. They are just not colorful.
Look at this painting - [0]. Are you telling me the red tone doesn't stand out?
[0] - https://largemodernart.com/products/original-abstract-art-oi...
Come on, I think you know what we mean and are just being pedantic.
Which colour stands out here? https://business.cap.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/cap_ex...
Sure you can. Red rose in a field of green for example. Human eyes evolved to see the colours the way they do precisely because they were working in a world where nearly everything is colourful and some things needed to stand out.
A field of green is not colourful.
> Possessing prominent and varied colors.
Have you looked at a field recently? Spot the flowers: https://wallpapercave.com/field-of-flowers-wallpaper - I'm not sure what you call colourful; but I call those colourful. The flowers are still hard to miss. The colour makes them more obvious.
If you want a more academic source; try https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/courses/120/Lectures/... slides 13 & 14. Colour isn't some random distraction, the human vision system uses it to help decide what to focus on. Then you get things like peacocks where they go all in on using colourful visualisations to attract attention.
> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth.
I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.
This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).
The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama, and then also a serious technical problem involving HDR device-side (which is a whole other story).
But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.
However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.
> The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama
It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge". https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d...
> I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff.
It's now permeated everything, so it's hard to not watch stuff, as it's everywhere, with few exceptions.
Right. For a long time I wondered what's going on, and eventually started believing it's my fault - that maybe I'm just a rare HDR-poor person watching TV shows on SDR computer displays, maybe I've hit an unusual corner case in the video decoding path, or something. I kept believing that until Star Trek: Picard, Season 3, which made it clear it's not me, it's them.
The whole show, like everything in the past decade or so, was dark and washed out (except for some space FX parts, where at least some colors were saturated, sometimes). This lasted up until the last two episodes, where for plot reasons[0], some protagonists found themselves onboard a ship from TNG-era shows (1980s - 2000s), pulled straight from a museum, which means the set was recreated as it was on old shows, complete with the lighting. From that scene onwards through the final episode, as it jumped between that one special set and every other dark and gray scene, I had proof in front of me that scenes in modern shows can be properly lit, they just aren't, and it's an active choice[1].
Importantly, this scene wasn't a one-off gimmick that risked coming out too bright on normal people's HDR-enabled TV screens. The set involved was, per the showrunner, pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the entire season, and they burned most of the season's budget on perfecting it[2]. Them being able to light it well (and have it coexist with every other badly-lit scene) only proves there's no technical obstacle involved - that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
--
[0] - Hard to navigate around a major spoiler and highlight of the era in the franchise.
[1] - Actually, I can't give this scene enough justice. But given how massive moment that was for people following the franchise, I'll just provide a link to the video (SPOILER WARNING): https://youtu.be/t-mY4Xbjyn8?t=42 -- watch in max quality; compare okay-ish exterior CG early on, observe how dark and washed out scenes with people are - and this is literally how the entire season (and really, entire show) was until that point... or just scroll to 2:27, and then on a perfect cue - "computer, lights!" - observe how next 30 seconds reveal that everything could've been properly lit from the start, but for some non-tech reason, it wasn't.
[2] - Most of that was eaten up by casting very specific people, but the set itself was damn expensive too.
> that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.
Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.
But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.
> It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge".
It is. The article you link even begins:
> So many TV shows and movies now
That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.
You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.
It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
> The article you link even begins: "So many TV shows and movies now"
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
> The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama
You're absolutely wrong, it happened to video games too. The industry defended it by saying it made games look more "realistic", but have since backed off after consumers revolted and dubbed the aesthetic "piss filter."
Started in the mid 00s, went strong for about a decade and still persists to a lesser degree today. Only designers like it, consumers broadly hate it.
> color grades the shit out of color
Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.
It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.
Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.
According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.
The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen different vendors over a year-long post-production cycle. This can still work when you have a director like a James Cameron who's hands-on throughout the process and has top-notch VFX director and cinematography skills. But that's not the norm. This creates systemic incentives for directors, cinematographers and LDs to lens flat, unexpressive shots. Because if there's not consistent, hand-on creative direction over the whole process, the editor and colorist are left trying to stitch together a bunch of shots and elements that weren't created to exist cohesively in the same frame. I suspect not managing this complexity is how visual disasters like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania happen.
Sadly, there's no reason it has to be this way. Technically, it's entirely possible to create a VFX-heavy movie that looks like every part of every frame was lensed by a master like Bernardo Bertolucci. There's nothing required that's even that hard or expensive compared to modern VFX blockbuster complexity or budgets. I think the reason we haven't seen it yet is two-fold: today's top producers, directors and cinematographers rarely have the new and diverse skill sets required in one person and none of the few with the skills and experience has had both the creative intention and budget to do it. I'm actually hopeful that maybe in the next few years someone like a Nolan or Cameron will decide to try to take it to this level as an aspiration. Currently, many of those with the budgets and cred are choosing to address the challenge by reverting to creating effects with practical sets and in-camera techniques. This can avoid the problem but it's looking backward instead of embracing the challenge and doing the pioneering work of figuring out how to push through and solve it. Whoever does it may discover all-new creative and expressive capabilities.
The video you link has turned into a classic.
But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable.
They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras.
We didn't "forget" how to "make movies look like movies". We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom. And like always, people will disagree over aesthetic choices.
I totally understand what you mean, though, about lighting vs grading, and where what gets done, but there are good arguments for doing more with grading rather than in the lighting. It ultimately allows the editor+grader+director to make a lot more choices, and that's generally a good thing. You say "color grading in post should be for small tweaks" but I respectfully disagree. And obviously, there isn't even a choice when it comes to the outdoors in daytime -- it has to be done in the grading.
I broadly agree with what you're saying. In my post, I was specifically addressing cases where a lack of expressive diversity in looks is a result of the factors discussed - basically the failure mode where color grading becomes a crutch instead of one part of an intentionally crafted look. In non-failure cases, color grading can be fantastically expressive and a key element in the cinematographer's toolbox.
As I mentioned, the problem is a strange lack of visual diversity in looks. I'm all for increasing artistic and expressive range and I'm not one of those pining for old-school processes. As you said, film had and still has a lot of limitations. Having been involved in both pre-digital film production and analog video production, we had to spend stupid amounts of effort to avoid or overcome the inherent technical limitations we were saddled with. It was incredibly frustrating and I'd spend time dreaming about a future where those technical (and chemical) limitations no longer haunted us. I guess that's why I'm sort of dismayed that so many creators aren't utilizing the truly incredible technical fidelity even consumer gear provides today.
I should also have mentioned I don't fully agree with every point made in the video I linked but it is a terrific way to highlight that the issue isn't technical limitations of digital production. It's either an explicit creative choice to settle for visual blandness or the result of not making explicit choices leading to an ambient default sameness.
> We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom.
That's what I find delightful about today's best work. And I'm fine respecting different creative choices, as long as someone actually thought about it and made those choices intentionally because they believed it was the best realization of their unique vision. But it's also true that the range of looks in today's content isn't as wide as it should be. There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project. Or the recent epidemic of 'HDR-flat' desaturation. We can and should strive to do better - to think and create different and deploy the full palette of expression we're so fortunate to finally have at our fingertips. I want to see and celebrate a broad range of expressively unique, creatively opinionated looks - even ones I don't personally care for - whether created in-camera, in grading or even purely in CGI.
I should also add that there's still an element of technical limitation driving some of this default to visual conservatism. Sadly, inconsistent (and sometimes just broken) HDR implementations across consumer viewing platforms is a frustrating issue and I sympathize with colorists and mastering engineers prepping content for literally 200 different distribution formats. While technically-based, these issues are all the more tragic because there's no underlying reason it had to be such a shit show of uneven implementation. HDR, wide color gamuts and deep color spaces are all well-specified and purely in the digital domain. High-quality digital processing and conversion is inexpensive and built into even cheap HDMI encoder chips so even the cheapest consumer displays with limited capabilities should be able to map content created with higher color spaces and wide dynamic ranges so that they still broadly represent the creator's intent. Yet too many still fail to properly handle mapping HDR and WCG content.
> I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
could a factor driving current monotone style be less about aesthetics and taste and more that we're all just cognitively exhausted?
everything is fighting for our attention because our attention has been monetized. so when something bland shows up, it simultaneously provides a bit of respite and can seem more 'trustworthy' because it isn't clamoring for your attention.
if i were buying some kitchen appliances and i had a choice between a brightly colored models or a stark, utilitarian models, i have to admit that the stark ones have appeal because they "look professional" (even though it may not actually be pro quality) and "the color is just a sales gimmick" (even though boring industrial grey is also a sales gimmick)
> we're all just cognitively exhausted?
If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
> If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
My impression from the data is not that greyscale now dominates the physical environment, but that browns once dominated. Presumably because things like wood, copper, etc. once dominated the materials we engrossed ourselves in. As we've expanded the paints and other materials we live with, we've found much more balance.
Is that really true or isiit just that blues and greens biodegrade and so the only evidence of the past's colors we have is the mineral colors. We have evidence that paint has been used on wood furniture - but not what color was used.
It is true that it is my impression of the data. A different dataset could possibly give me a different impression, but without that dataset...
I think the sensory load idea is productive, but I'd add a related idea of drawing attention to key things only.
I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.
But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.
Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.
When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.
(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)
I have a different take on interior wall colors: any shade too far off from white actually darkens the room no matter the color.
Paint colors subtractively from light: you never get more light into a room when you're knocking out wavelengths rather then reflecting them. Whereas with whiter walls you always have the option of manipulating color by using colored lighting.
> cognitively exhausted?
i find it cognitively exhausting to watch movies that are so dark that most times i cannot even see the eye color of the cast
Well, visually exhausting is something that imho happens only if you find unpleasant the colors you're seeing. The wonderful island of Burano is something I would never get tired of, yet it's so colorful.
I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that catch - and drain - our attention
Then again I'd probably be fine with a super duper wallpaper like this so perhaps we won't agree on some things such as having few colorful elements https://www.photowall.com/ee/memphis-piazza-panorama-wallpap...
I don't hate the wall art in your example... it's not quite my taste, but it doesn't make me pull my hair out. If you look at something like the link below, I'd hate having to be anywhere near it. Busy patterns and mixes of color just feel like noise and give me (sometimes literally) a headache.
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/vintage-bathroom-makeover-p...
Ok, I don't like that mess too
> It's visually exhausting.
This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
> I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.
Love the phrasing. I found myself in the past few days getting in a pair of disputes in HN comments that may have boiled down reading the exaggerated adjectives literally, when the authors may not have intended that.
> I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend.
> If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
Pretty much every retail store is like this. I mean, it's been this way for a while, but there is so much loud colorful advertizing that having a quiet place to live in feels much better.
The example they use of Baroque art actually perfectly demonstrates this. It primarily consists of neutral tones that integrate well with the blues and muted oranges woven through it. Not exactly riotous color, as they put it - but very similar to the use of color you see both in modern designs and older cultural traditions.
(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.
Isn't all that art faded out, though? I wouldn't be surprised if Baroque period art was originally painted with riotous color first and then faded over time to where it now looks merely like an "opinionated use of color".
In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.
I just searched for some colorised Roman statues and they don't seem to be overusing color. Even complex designs might be basically three colors (e.g. red, blue and white, plus with brown hair and eyes), and the colors themselves are a bit muted. I guess the have been painted based on modern interpretations of the original colors based on whatever limited evidence remains, so maybe those aren't the original colors, but it doesn't seem like a 1990s era website or a garish collection of first gen iMacs and iBooks.
Yes and, part of it is advertising visually tormenting us. They throw uber catchy colorful banners of stuff we're often not interested in the slightest, doing everything to get our attention. Also, websites featuring advertisement are encouraged to have more muted tones so they stand out. That gets tiresome and we tend to want rest for private spaces.
But overall I agree. If everything is uber-colorful, that can become just overwhelming. Also we are a lot more stimulated throughout the day with screen and movies and games. In the olden days you didn't have a smartphone with a colorful screen, so putting lots of colour in your house or your church made more sense.
I'd want less advertisement, and more thoughtful color choices throughout cities and digital spaces.
Whatever colour you put on the wall at home, you get used to. Your senses acclimatize to it because you see it all the time, even if it initially seemed "riotous".
Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.
Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
Even if it's in one's own living space it's possible to not get used to something. In those cases, for those types of personalities, it'll usually get replaced or painted over. One thing I completely abhor are busy tile patterns, it can be the shapes or colors, and no, I wouldn't get used to it.
In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.
Then what happens, if you're that type of person, after you've replaced or painted over something? Do you relax and become comfortable with what's left? Or do you move on to the next irritant, that will bug you until you've replaced or painted over that?
I saw some pictures from a house where everything was white. The walls were white, the tables and chairs were white, the pillows were white, lamps were white, etc. But I bet the owner didn't see it as everything being white, like I did. I bet that when they'd look at the same pictures, they'd see all the little details here and there that were not white, or not quite white enough. I imagine them being in a constant state of stress over the non-white blemishes.
I don't know them, I just saw the pictures, so I don't truly know how they feel, I could be just imagining things. But my gut feeling is that someone with a home like that is not at ease with themselves.
For your example, probably. Different people will have different compulsive behaviors. I painted my kitchen cabinets shortly after moving in... I didn't do the best job of it, and I do notice the blemishes, inconsistencies and bleed through as well as a few spots that chipped over the last 6 years or so. Not enough that I stress over it, or even really think about it in general, but recognize.
I don't think I'd ever want something all that monochrome for myself. To me, subdued isn't about monochrome so much as limiting the noise. I don't even mind a sharp contrast, such as a colorful photo/painting. It's what I can only describe as visual noise that gets me. Especially with patterns that aren't really something you'd see in nature.
> Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I disagree. The 60s through the 80s had a wide color palette with extremely good design. Early 1900s too. Heck even the Greek statues were extremely colorful.
I don't know about that... the 70s is called "the decade that taste forgot" for a reason...
You're right, modern design often favors neutral bases with pops of color.
However, if everyone followed that same "modern taste," everything would look alike. Just as the technicolor era had its appeal, so do bold color palettes.
The best approach depends on the desired effect and overall design.
There's definitely a cultural component to "modern taste". South Asian cultures have a preference for warm tones and many vibrant colors. East Asian cultures from developing and developed countries these days have lots of cool tones and monotone aesthetics. While I found the article a bit short on the "why", I do agree that the West has had a philosophical disdain for color from the Industrial era.
> Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background.
You've got me imagining a bright green room filled with silver appliances and white furniture.
You can see the same thing in music recordings during the 60s. Stereo and quadrophonic sound was new so everything was panned all over the place really hard. Drums all on the left, vocals hard right etc. It's an interesting effect sometimes, but generally a gimmick and/or distraction. We don't really do that anymore, for good reason.
I don't think we stopped doing it because it's gimmicky.
Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.
Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.
So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.
IIRC, the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album was among the first stereo-mixed albums released. As much fame as that particular album has, the original mix is really bad. Drums all left, guitars all right, nothing in the center. It sounds weird to modern ears!
Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.
One of the reasons being that more people had mono systems so the stereo mixdown was just kind of a "for fun" afterthought. They didn't take it as seriously.
Even worse is when they keep screwing with the panning. I can't stand Led Zeppelin II for that reason. Someone just couldn't stop messing with the damn slider, right in the middle of songs. The ones with merely bad, but static, panning are far more tolerable.
Because the analog equipment back then could only do binary panning.
I've heard this is a recommended paradigm for mixing, to only ever pan things R, C, L and nothing in between, but it doesn't make sense to me. Possible because i have to mix on headphones, but it sounds much too extreme to me. Sure, _some things_ can go all the way but i generally enjoy to fill the space between the far edges, and allow some reverb busses to blur the lines a bit if needed.
Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down
No, that's complete nonsense.
That’s totally not true. The original stereo patent from the 1930s is based on M+S signals, not separate channels, and was born out of a desire to position sound across a stage (movies).
By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.
Your conclusion is not supported by data, you basically made the periods thing up to confirm your own preference.
Gentrification of certain areas are definitely making things visually stale.
Man the world you paint is just not one I want to live in. Without color what's the damn point? I'd rather be corny than have to live like this.
I'd rather movies and TV shows look more realistic than washed-out, unless there is a good stylistic reason for it.
Same.
Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.
> But when everything is colorful,
But nothing is colorful. Every damn thing is a shade of gray. It's like "50 shade of gray" fans started doing UIs.
I mean... ish? There is something to be said for a minimal styling, but there is clearly an aesthetic change to things. As an easy example, wallpaper used to be far more common, and was often far more busy than the neutral colors people insist on in homes nowadays. Not just more colorful, but with designs on them.
You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.
I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
What does your desktop look like?
Fuck modern taste. I have a bedroom where the walls and bedding are deep blue and it's accented with neutral colors. There's another room which is a rich shade of purple. Doing without bold use of color isn't tasteful, it's just boring.
I think technology certainly had an effect. I remember pre-2008, the design trends were mostly centered around pushing the boundaries in terms of software capabilities. For example shiny/translucent 'pill buttons' became insanely popular as image editors became good at creating rounded corners and gradients with alpha transparency and layering them... Then eventually the trend became minimalist with a focus on simpler shapes and colors and larger fonts to make interfaces look less cluttered.
I think the duller colors we see nowadays has something to do with the ongoing minimalism trend. Minimalism is seen as professional-looking. Unfortunately, now we have the problem that brands struggle to differentiate themselves because any overly creative design risks coming across as 'unprofessional'. The balance of 'appearing unique' and 'appearing professional' has shifted towards the latter.
In a broader sense, it reflects society's shift towards increased centralization and conformity and an intolerance towards outliers.
Speak for yourself then because I think this looks great and fun.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1jnr4bz/...
By the comments, I don't think I'm the only one.
Look at the logo evolution.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LivingMas/comments/17yizkw/evolutio...
Why is Taco Bell slowly losing color like a vampire is draining it of fun and blood? I see these driving around and I just shake my head, what about light purple and white represents Mexican culture and food? It's the whitest thing they could do without making the sign all white. Same thing with Target. Now some of the logos are white on white!
https://www.designyourway.net/blog/target-logo/
It's odd that in this era where we are supposed to be embracing diversity and difference that we are homogenizing our logos to white or gray goo.
I dunno, I think the purple and white is quite in line with the degree to which Taco Bell food represents Mexican culture and food.
I agree. I'd even say it embodies optimism.
Are you young? I've noticed the upcoming generation has begun rejecting their parent's bland aesthetics.
No, I'm not young. I remember all those Taco Bell logos from 1985 up pretty much. :)
No thank you. I prefer rich colors, they consistently make world look a more lively place, the more the better. There is some getting used to of course, but it doesn't normalize at the same bottom that sea of grey/white/black is.
I hate this with passion with cars - sea of grey in western Europe. Heck, both of our cars are grey - we always buy used ones and there was simply no other option that wasn't 10k more expensive for params we wanted and were willing to pay. It looks bland, boring, unimaginative. One of top reasons why buy new - one can actually choose something nicer.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over India and boy do they use crazy intense colors all over and everywhere including clothing - orange, purple, pink, very bright, both men and women. A very, very nice visual experience one doesn't get used to. Then coming back to western civilization where literally everybody dresses in black or dark grey during winter. Its just sad view, like winter with low amount of sunlight isn't depressing enough, no lets add some more monotonous colors.
As an Indian living in a western European country - I very much prefer the gray/ neutral colors here. I always found the excessive and ugly use of color in India overwhelming. Though, I agree, a bit of more colors in winter wear would be nice.
The pic featured on TFA evidently shows that color is going down vs. black/white.
This is a trend, not an opinion.
That misrepresents Technicolor. The 3-film process was adopted in the 1930s. It was the most popular, but not first, incarnation of Technicolor.
Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.
The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/01/pink-blue/
> It's bad design
Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
"Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone."
What a load of crap. Where do you live, in a cave? have you ever been in a jungle perhaps? what about birds with colorful feathers? you want to wash out those colors too? jesus, nature dictates and nature is full of vivid colors. so your argument goes down the drain.
there is no such thing as modern taste. there are trends dictated by a handful of psychotic gatekeepers who got hooked on their own farts.
old movies had the absolute best coloring. compare those movies to the ones seen now and you are on the verge of retching. these superficial, devoid of human value superprocessed heaps of shit they try to force feed to people, just plain unwatchable. not just the story lacks, it has zero message, nothing to chew on, just some brainwashing action scenes. that's good for the plebs they say while squeezing people for money.
absolutely reprehensible, that a handful of gatekeepers put people into these literal psycho gardens that is devoid of anything resembling human. what's missing is the human part. the humanity is slowly missing from everything.
Jungles are actually a great example. They are mostly neutral browns and dark greens that form a pretty neutral background... with the occasional beautiful bright accent colors from a bird or flower or something. But if you trek through the jungle, it's pretty boring color-wise most of the time. Which is why spotting a colorful bird is such a joy.
But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.
no personal attacks. attacks against idiotic oversimplifications.
do not hide behind some weeny invisible bs wall you erected
Cars suck then. We have destroyed our environments, both natural and human made, because of them.
I don't think anyone would argue the point of cars is to look pretty or make the environment more balanced. Cars are successful in spite of looking like shit and damaging the environment.
the history of cars in the US is pretty complicated tbh. most major cities had street cars and rail systems for a long time before major government initiatives ripped them out in favor of highways and streets. I'm not sure cars would be as popular without that major push towards car-centric infrastructure.
Of course. If you can't drive a car anywhere cars would not be as popular. That doesn't sound like rocket science to me.
Wow, so much to rage about from the article.
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
Another thing that might also play a role is this styling trend of vehicles looking "meaner" and more and more aggressive. This was discussed[1] a bit on HN a while ago. Bright colors don't really match the "My vehicle is going to punch you in the face" styling (for cars and especially trucks) that has become popular.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32425520
I'd say farm equipment has embraced the same "meaner" trend, but has also doubled down on bright, vibrant colours.
Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still.
That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this year and gone the next, so if you have one of those no-longer-available colours it sticks out like a sore thumb as looking old. Which is what I believe the consumer truly fears – owning a car that looks old and dated.
The blacks and whites have remained consistently available, so it is far less risky.
Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.
I specifically wear a bright red top when I'm outdoor skating for reasons of visibility.
Mercedes lead with "silver" cars decades ago such that the color itself meant luxury. Other car manufacturers (and car buyers) then followed.
Literally every vehicle seems to have that diagonal line incorporated somewhere. I mean the one generally near the windows that slopes downward as it moves towards the front of the car, regardless of the general shape of the car itself.
I assume you mean the line near the handles on this Corolla [1]? That whole part of the car is doing a lot of different things.
1. Flat vertical panels are a no-no. Adding creases increases buckling resistance.
2. That's a hugely important area for cabin noise because the side mirrors cause turbulence and the vehicle body needs a channel to constrain the turbulent flow and flex as little as possible near the door seals.
3. The skin needs to expand outwards from the line of the pillars to fit the window mechanisms, the handles/locks, and the side impact protection without intruding into the cabin space.
4. It makes the car look more sporty and interesting. The technical term for the crease itself is "character line", and it's the main reason why the Corolla has one. It's visual reinforcement for the modern standard combo of low hoods-high trunks that's considered attractive styling.
5. The greenhouse (cabin) narrows towards the top for rollover safety and aerodynamic reasons (a.k.a tumblehome), and this needs to blend with the rest of the body in a visually appealing way. The cybertruck is a good example of how unusual it can look if this is just a straight line on the body. Here's a comparison between the current design and an ai-generated "rounded" design [2] [3].
[1] https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/CP/44005...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/files/67a2770e2906d20008bad29f/1-...
[3] https://static0.carbuzzimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploa...
Not sure which diagonal line you mean but I expect some creases are added for structural reasons, so the large areas of the metal are rigid, not floppy.
I think the generations below boomers prefer non-chrome options. The blacks and dark accents add to the meaner look.
> Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Shudders. A lot of shows were utterly unwatchable for me.
(Now they're just unwatchable because of the mumbling/whispering and the colour palettes tweaked to the extent nothing has any contrast left.)
> Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by.
Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed or something. Recall that the 90s were still pretty colorful in regards to clothing here in the US. And then just a couple of years later people here were all starting to wear those greys, charcoals and black.
When I learned about teal-orange LUTs I started seeing them everywhere.
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
I enjoyed Midsommar's overuse of orange/teal because it really led to the feeling that the viewer was on a psychedelic trip (which usually comes with oversaturating of reds and orange.) Agree that Marvel is doing a lot of trend chasing in its color grading.
Ditto.
Maybe we should be more blissful, not sure what leads to bliss....
> Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though
Apple really drops the ball on colors in 99% of their products. You have the iMac and.... oh wait, that's it. There are no real colors on the pro phones and even the non-pro phones looks like something that got 1 of 10 coats of color. And then the MBPs have a handful of shades of gray, I would totally buy a green or blue MBP if there was one.
> I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars
This. If you look at the cars, pretty much the only "stock" bright color is red. I used to drive a grass green car (vinyl wrap), and it stood out everywhere.
I wish car makers offered more color options by default.
Almost all car makers offer bright colours by default. In my driveway is a bright blue Subaru (it was hard to pick between the blue and eye-searing orange) and a bright copper coloured Suzuki. Mazda is becoming famous for their innovative colour options. Google "Nissan Micra colours" to see what even Japan's most conservative carmaker offers to those who care to look.
On selected models only :( E.g. Ford doesn't offer anything brighter than muted red on their Escape vehicles. They do have brightly-colored Mustangs, but nothing else.
Even Mazda doesn't offer them for all their vehicles.
Mate there are plenty of options if you want a nice coloured car.
Not if you also want an EV.
BYD does some incredibly striking colours. So does VW. Lot of excuses here when there are plenty of great colourways available.
Not seeing very much in green
https://dbrand.com/shop/devices/macbook-skins Here you go - now you can make your macbook look great and unique.
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
awesome insight. i've heard this referred to as the "site merchandising" problem. There are some products that are there to attract people / give them a choice, but they don't sell themselves.
Reminiscent of halo cars in the automotive industry. Fancy flagship vehicles produced to show off the brand and bring attention (to their other vehicles), but not necessarily to become profit makers themselves.
Yeah, my theory was that the yellow ones caught people's eye since it stood out from the visual clutter, but yellow isn't anyone's favorite color, so you end up buying blue or red...
As someone who's own{s|ed} 2 yellow cars (A Mercedes SLK230 and a Mustang MachE) This makes me sad. I've also owned 3 red cars and one blue one so my color choices aren't exactly in line with the sales data.
Taxis took over the color yellow unfortunately.
I always loved the yellow Acura Integras too.
Or the Mac Pro.
I heard plasma tvs did exactly that for beard trimmers or whatever.
In fact, there is demand for colorful products. However, the way businesses measure demand today is through the aggregate unit demand. In effect, you get the lowest common denominator products rising to the top, and people with specific preferences can't get at their desired products. If instead, businesses would measure demand at a more granular level, they'd see this and be able to better serve their customers.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
base neutral colors sell well, exotic colors sell in small amounts => they die out due to small scale/being niche
I think this is really the reason. Companies also save money by not making things in a variety of colors.
I think it goes one layer further, everyone is worried that everyone else is worried that colors don't sell. "I like this used bright pink Honda, but I'm worried no one else will buy it if I want to sell so I'm not going to buy it"
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
Cars are not buy it for life items. I generally buy a 3 year old car because it is about half the price of a new one - but I'm limited to what color I can find. If I bought new cars I could get whatever color - except that new car buyers won't be seen in a 4 year old car, and they can only afford to upgrade (to the extent they can) if the car has resale value so they care about what color they (the dealer) thinks will sell.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
> Cars are not buy it for life items.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
If you buy new and drive for live you are a minority and so manufacturers (and banks via loans) won't make that type of thing that sell you but don't have perceived resale. If you buy newish used and keep for life you are stuck with what they think you will buy.
I'm on my 16th year with my Jetta, bought new. For appearances I should probably buy a new car (it's totaled), but I'm pretty sure it will last another 16 years and will only be replaced out of necessity (were I to have a family) or vanity (were I to have a midlife crisis). I've worked from home or commuted by bicycle most of the time I've owned it so I've averaged < 8,000 miles per year.
>If I bought new cars I could get whatever color
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
A long time ago I adopted a personal style of wearing bright colors. I have simple good fitting t-shirts in all colors. Glasses in blue and red. Shoes in yellow. Sandals in green. Jackets in orange. You get the idea.
It's always easy to make an outfit that goes together and makes a good impression. Men's Japanese and European fashion brands work well with this choice. I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I've found that it's very disarming and engaging; even though I'm over 6'3" and a big guy with a tight hair cut, I'm almost never perceived as a threat. I'm a natural introvert, but it seems to make approachability easier. Since having a kid, and him growing into a toddler, I think it helps there too. It's just more fun. Strong recommend.
>I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I can't speak to Amsterdam, but it's commonly said that the way you know Americans in Paris is that they're wearing bright colors. The navy blue suit is almost a uniform for professional Parisian men.
That's interesting, how do you manage the color palette? Are all the colors bright or are just using one or two bright pieces as accents?
I do something very similar! Just mix and match. Never really looks bad IMO; and anyone who disagrees hasn't said so yet… and their opinion probably doesn't matter anyway!
> According to major auto paint suppliers, more than 80% of new cars are now grayscale. Black, white, gray, and silver dominate the roads. Reds, blues, and greens in auto production are increasingly rare.
This is biased data: when cars that are not white or black cost 1000 of euros more from the factory, and custom non-preselected colors even more, then people tend to but the cheap colors. Especially when they are corporate lease cars and the corporation doesn’t care about the color.
If car companies want more color, do not charge for it.
Gen Z is rejecting this "millennial bland" aesthetic of turning all spaces into an Apple store. Just one reason I appreciate and look forward to the coming generation. Take a look at some of their trends in art, music, fashion, graphic design... plenty of color to be found.
It's especially ironic because Apple did, at one time, push vividly coloured transparent-plastic designs.
It makes sense, doesn't it?
When computers were beige, they went all in on color to stand out. When everything started being more colorful, they moved to white and then grey/silver. Now that everything is grey/silver, they're moving to gold/rose.
As an elder millennial, words cannot express how much I despise "Millennial Gray." When I was househunting for my current house, it was depressing how much was out there, because a brand-new gray kitchen, bath, or floor is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Paint I can paint over, but yuck.
I specifically bought a "millennial gray" apartment and put bland furniture: it's mostly white, black, and brown. The twist is that I'm putting colorful decorations, so that when you enter my living room, your eyes ignore all the "functional" items, and focus on decorative items, because these are colorful. It's like those video games where environment is grey but interactive objects are lit.
Only the living room has any colors. Bedroom and bathroom are as boring as can be, so that you do your shit, don't get distracted, and get back to the living room.
I've heard that before. Supposedly gen X (which I'm a part of) was rejecting the bland colors of their baby boomer parents back when we were in our 20s. I don't know what happened.
May I make a case for brown?
- Brown is an extremely warm color, and sucks up all of the ugly blues from unnatural light sources
- Brown pairs well with all sorts of shades and colors, just like the millennial gray and white tones
- Brown can come in all sorts of shades and vibrancies, but is not as stimulating as other colors
- Brown hides dirt, scuffs, and stains extremely well
Humans have spent most of our history being very familiar with the color brown in our natural world. I moved from a modern home (everything in white and grays) and into a 1920s brown home with brown-beige walls and all of its original brown wood accents and fixtures. And then I stuffed it with brown furniture. Not only is it beautiful and cozy, I swear that this was the first year I didn't suffer from seasonal affective disorder in a long time.
Reminds me of the "ugliest color"[1], the brown Pantone 448 C, selected for use on tobacco products in an attempt to dissuade purchase. However it turned out to be quite nice looking on packages[2], and at last here in Norway lead to no measurable decrease in sales[3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone_448_C
[2]: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/ddB3zq/designekspertene-elsker-d...
[3]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/fhi_-ny-design-pa-roykpakker-og-...
We famously had "The Brown Era" in video game art direction for a while, maybe 2005-2010. Most people claimed they hated it.
It may be called the "brown era", but it had more to do with desaturated, monochrome palettes in general (to this article's point) and muddy textures.
Ironically Quake was like that in 1996, and, partially, Deus Ex.
"Hides dirt" is a disadvantage to many. Especially somewhere public.
Brown and all its hues is very underappreciated color.
A lot of this stuff is just designers imitating each other. You see this a lot in web design where every website uses similar colors, fonts, visual language etc. I've worked with a few good designers that do actual original design where the point is to be different in a tasteful way. Standing out from the grey masses. If you get a lot of people copying each other, it all averages out to the same bland/boring stuff.
A lot of Hollywood productions these days are sequels, re-runs, and endless variations of successful movies. Down to copying stylistic elements, color grading, etc.
I love Tim Burton and Wes Anderson as directors. Both use vibrant, saturated colors and have a very recognizable style. Tim Burton uses lush, saturated colors to portray suburbs (many of his movies feature lush green lawns white picket fences, etc.).
And Wes Anderson has his famous style of exactly centered subjects,using a lot of surrealist visuals, and elaborate sets and models. I loved the little Roald Dahl thing he did on Netflix two years ago or so (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) where all of this was on display. If you haven't seen that, worth a watch.
Part of this that affects me is interior decorations in the age of RGB LED lighting. If your home interior is white, you can cast any color onto it from an RBG light, but if your interior paint has a non-greyscale hue, coloring it with LED lights produces unexpected results that are inconsistent with other areas of the house that are painted other colors.
Another part that affects me is being colorblind. When I was in elementary school I was mocked for wearing one blue sock and one purple sock, something that I was unaware that I was doing. I began wearing less color because at least I could be confident that I wasn't mismatching my clothes. But then in high school I was mocked for always wearing greyscale clothes because "what are you, colorblind or something?"
My son (11 years old) always wears mismatched socks. Even when we match them in his drawer he will unmatch them (we no longer bother). I'm not sure if style has changed or he just isn't old enough to care what girls think.
Well hey, if that's his style, and he can find the confidence to "own" it, the right kind of girl will appreciate him for it.
(As long as it's not too outlandish of a sock combo, ha)
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that people respond well to unusual styles as long as you wear it with confidence. For example, I sometimes wear a pocket watch when I dress up. It's not in vogue or anything, but I think they're cool and I don't really care whether or not anyone else does. The funny thing is, I've had multiple people tell me that they appreciate my pocket watch thing. I think maybe people are attracted to authenticity, when someone has the confidence to do their own thing for their own sake rather than worrying about others' opinions.
A pocket watch is the ideal level of eccentricity. A monocle would be too much.
As adults that is true, but in high school perceived peer pressure is important and so most kids act like their peers. (there are a number of different groups in most schools and they are not a like, but you pick yours and belong to it)
It's true as a kid too, it's just that a lot of kids haven't learned the lesson yet. One of the most important lessons you can learn when you're young is to disregard peer pressure.
Or he thinks girls like it. That he looks more cool than other boys like that.
One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works."
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
> the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.
I think you really start to see the fetishization of the Greeks and Romans in the Neoclassicism movements in the 18th century as an aesthetic, and I'm actually not sure how much was known about the actual Greek and Roman lifestyles (Roman, in particular - a big lot of this is tied up with the notions of Empire) at the time.
Maybe not “the Greeks” broadly, but Spartans specifically are equated with austerity to the extent that “spartan” is adopted as an adjective meaning “showing indifference to comfort and luxury”.
Do people associate the Greeks with the Spartans more than the Athenians though?
Heh, not in Southern Europe. They are like the spark of the Western Civilization from Law to Arts to Mathematics and Science.
Kids are taught about them as about super serious no fun civilizations. Then I associate it woth fetishisation of military conquest and such.
I would see God's as hedonistic but not greeks. Honestly, my bias is that they were very boring amd sort of artificial.
"Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class."
I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
That's just upmarket-priced vendors using influencers to advertise.
You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.
You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
For me, it is very apparent in movies nowadays.
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
Wild. Because that is one of the first, most heavily color graded films I can recall. Theoden's coming out from under the spell of Saruman is the most hit-you-ver-the-head use of color-grading that I can think of. (And, perhaps in a fantasy film it's fine.)
Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
And for a brief moment I stopped to think about whether we're looking at a horrible middle earth hallmark movie or just some 'clever' parody.
I live in South Africa, and when I traveled to the Netherlands on holiday last year, I was quite taken aback at how muted everyone's clothing was.
It is definitely not like that here - everything from our flag down is full of color.
Sample size of two, but when I went to Costa Rica and then China, I did not get the sense that color was going out of fashion in either place. Indeed it seemed jarring how cOLorFuL everything was. But after a week I got used to it.
It's a cute article, but I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. I suspect it is much more a collection of unrelated reasons:
* Historical objects in museums are likely more colorful because we cared to preserve the most visually striking objects. Classic survivorship bias.
* Music has less dynamic range than in early recordings because producers were competing to be the loudest sounding song on the radio (see "loudness wars"). Those wars are actually over now and dynamic range has been increasing for about a decade.
* There is a whole lot going on behind trends in cinematographer color grading if you look into that world. But in the example here, I think it's largely that audiences expected "muted brown" as the color grade to send a "period film" signal. Witness also how every medieval or fantasy movie feels compelled to have all of the castle walls bare gray rock when they were in fact plastered and brightly colored. Likewise Roman architecture being alabaster white. Audiences wouldn't believe a Roman movie with painted statues or a fantasy film with colorful castle walls.
* Cars have muted colors because consumers moved towards a model where they sell cars every few years. When purchasing a car, they choose neutral colors to maximize resale value. Also, I think cars are simply much less a part of someone's social identity and status symbol and more of a utilitarian object than they they used to be. (Witness that when people buy expensive sports cars, those are more likely to be brightly colored.)
* Interior design trends come and go, but I think one of the drivers of gray walls was that it became a popular style for Airbnb rentals to avoid turning off potential renters. That led it to become associated with internationalism and modernity, and from there it sort of took off. Also, an increasing number of people are renting and are simply unable to paint their walls more interesting colors.
For those not in on Twitter lore I want to point out that the post is written by a well known white nationalist/neo-nazi dog whistling account.
Interestingly, there was a specific printing technology for expanding the palette of colour printing, Hexachrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.
To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:
> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).
whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:
> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.
The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?
[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
Am I the only one who thought the lead photo should have included Gen 1 iMac vs. latest lineup? Even the 2021 anodized aluminum version is comparatively muted!
Going through my junk box the other day I found a USB to two port RS-232 converter from that era - that came with 4 colorful snap on front pieces to match your iMac.
My wife convinced me that we should buy a dark gray car cause it would be less obviously dirty. I deeply regret not trying harder to convince her back, so we'd get a bright red or yellow one instead. It's super hard to find the car back on a parking lot and who cares when it's dirty? Bright colors are nice. I'm now trying to compensate by only buying colorful clothing going forward.
You can buy vinyl wrap for cheap and DIY install is possible. (professional install is expensive). I'm not sure how good they are, but it is your best option if you want color.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
I miss the 90s and the wild, loud colours the landscape of the future was supposed to be painted in. Now everything is off-white or grey.
"Millennial Gray" is a somewhat derogatory term that describes the interior decorating in many people's homes. It seems to be a generational thing. I think color will come back as Gen Z and Gen Alpha get older and become more dominant in the economy.
It's not entirely generational; as an Xennial I despise it with the fire of a thousand flaming suns.
> Baroque art stands in direct defiance of the chromophobic worldview. It doesn’t strip down experience in the name of order, but rather builds it up — embracing sensation and structure together.
All I can say is that if it is not baroque, do not fix it.
I am continuously surprised by the neverending parade of white cars on the roads.
They don't get as hot when parked under the sun though.
When it comes to things like cars and room interiors, neutral colors have a much better resale value because they appeal to people more widely. For cars, vibrant colors might mean higher insurance rates (red cars are associated with sports cars, young drivers and aggressive driving).
That is the general perception with Red and Orange which can cost more to insure.
There are other factors with car colour:
- Visibility: white and yellow are more visible and get a premium discount.
- Fleet ownership: which mostly means white.
The amount of grey manufactured at the moment is interesting as they attract a higher premium because they are basically the same colour as the road. Black is also deemed less visible.
Car color ought to be banned from being a consideration for insurance rates.
Interesting observation.
I prefer things with low color contrast in general, just to leave some color space for important things. Maybe this preference stems from the time I tweak color themes in IDEs.
In contrast, I also found more and more photography pieces which show vibrant colors and high color contrasts.
Random thoughts.
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
Cars: Searching online I found this chart: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev... - and ... it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time. A paragraph here - https://www.colorwithleo.com/why-isnt-green-a-popular-car-co... - provides something insightful:
"Historical Perceptions of Green Cars
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
> Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time
This is driven in part by a shift towards mobile screens and the compression in visual space. Even on the desktop the favicon has an influence with this deconstruction.
> it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time.
Because buying anything not in the standard white/black/corporate gray is easily an extra thousand euros on top of the car price. Red is still sometimes offered as standard color.
Just checked. I drive a Mazda CX-30. In Sweden literally anything that is not white is 500 to 1000 euro extra: https://www.mazda.se/bygg-din-mazda/MAZDA%20CX-30/5WGN/# skip to Exteriörlack (exterior color).
It would be nice if cars came in Hot Wheels Spectraflame. I’m sure the greigification of automobiles is down to some spreadsheet somewhere showing them they save two nickels for offering one less color.
Maybe only on surfaces. Lighting has become very colorful.
Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.
American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.
The 2020 study this is based on: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
And there was already a very similar article last year: https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color
Does this attempt to normalize for the possible case that colour is overrepresented in older art because pigments were so precious? Do we see a lot more purple represented than we should have expected to if we went further back than 1800? And as it became cheaper, it’s less novel and less interesting to utilize?
I wonder if seeing the world through digital screens had any effect on this.
Biologically, color drives behavior. Exposure to the same color palette over time develops tolerance, so *different* colors might be perceived as more attractive.
I believe each individual is unique in their color perception and emotional response, but there's obviously a shared social aspect of it too.
That said, it's interesting to see the young generation's artistic preferences, which reminds me of 90's for some reason :)
Is that Mr. Bean (red car, lower right) stalking out his arch-nemesis (upper-left, yellow)?
NVM, I think that's a Fiat, not Austin.
https://i.imgur.com/IA0TqUu.png
They take Napoleon, as recent film with bleak colors.
I will take latest matrix. The movie was awful, of course, but I was in awe of its bright, vivid, wonderful color work. If only plot was better.
The chart with car colors has been famous for a few years. However I'm seeing an inverse trend in past 1-2 years (at least in France); new cars are getting very colorful. For example:
- Renault Clio is very popular in metallic orange
- Renault 5 e-tech in bright yellow and green
- MG in aqua/azure blue
- Peugeot 208 in dark yellow and blue and dark red
Is there a case to be made for 'well, that's what we had the most colour of...', with regards to manufacturers...of the paint, that'll sell it cheap, just to get rid?
Just got back from a trip to Spain and Portugal.
Basically had culture shock driving down a wide north american road.
It's not just the colors. It's the emptiness.
The clearance of everything in north america is insane. It's just so boring.
Well, if you went to Spain to the Castilles/Aragon, specially to the Serranía Celtibérica area, you would find the same rural emptiness of the US. And, in Asturias/Cantabria/Palencia, at "Picos de Europa", you woudn't believe that these spikey, rough mountains with hard winters belong to Spain.
All of North America?
Not all I suppose - but it is the default.
I loath the lack of vibrancy in modern design and fashion. So dull, so boring, so agreeable. Thankfully it allows people who do have a bit of personality to easily stand out if they want to. Still waiting a red MacBook pro
It's the Seattlefication of the world.
I’ve certainly noticed this in film and interior design (most AirBnBs will have a familiar grayscale palette), but the opposite trend has occurred in software. Windows 2000 was far less colorful than Windows 10, which in turn had a more saturated palette than Vista and Windows 7.
And Windows 11 is significantly less colourful again. Also, you're missing out the most colourful version of all - Windows XP!
(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)
My small victory is to set the tv on a wider color space, and so make youtube more vivid. 5% of things will look a little strange, but the majority looks more beautiful. Note you actually need a modern tv with a REAL wide color space.
the car color thing may be real, but also it may be that people went overboard with color because they could, and then color got boring.
For the percent of colors in photos, i m not sure. Older technologies oversaturated colors and probably underrepresented greys (or turned them to red/green) , but maybe newer photo technologies allowed more blues and greys.
The cinema thing is real and very annoying to the point where i have to oversaturate all my screens in order to stop seeing actors' faces as corpses.
Maybe like spices. First they were something special in the western world, then they became abundant and cheap.
Why is nobody talking about how Car Insurance is typically higher with any real colour selections? Insurance companies calculate that vehicles with certain colours (for example, Red) have a higher statistical probability of being in a collision than say... grey. This has created a downward pressure for people who would like colours in their vehicles, but would instead prefer to just pay less in car insurance since they may be aware of this aspect.
I for one don't like that car insurance companies do this, but this very likely is a huge reason why fewer people buy vehicles with colour beyond Grey/etc.
I think this is a myth (at least in the US). I don't even have to provide the color of my car to get an insurance quote.
The exception (maybe the source of the myth) is that cars with custom or exotic colors will cost more if you opt for comprehensive coverage.
Can't speak for the US, but having built a few versions of a car insurance comparison tool for a popular Australian comparison site; colour was a factor used by a few insurers: yellow & white getting a discount; grey, black, dark green costing more. WHile red and orange are perceived as being sporty, factors such as a driver under 30 with a Nissan 300ZX, WRX or a V8 would blow out a premium far more and some insurers wouldn't even take the risk.
>I think this is a myth (at least in the US). I don't even have to provide the color of my car to get an insurance quote.
When I renew my insurance, on the website it shows 'grey'. They know what colour your car is.
The color is usually required to tie it back to government databases. I can change my car color and it doesn't affect my quote at all.
https://www.progressive.com/answers/red-car-myths/ https://www.allstate.com/resources/car-insurance/do-red-cars...
Pair with this complementary piece by W. David Marx:
https://culture.ghost.io/cultural-stasis-produces-fewer-chee...
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
I have a bright coloured car and it’s easy to find in the car park!
There's a really interesting book about this exact topic: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/chromophobia
edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.
I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.
"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."
All cat tractors are yellow. Does this answer your question? A handful of companies make almost all products.
China is a concrete jungle anywhere you have a mass of cameras.
That about sums it up. Not whatever US-based fashion trend that you hate this week.
Wait, his "graph" measures a greater gamut of colors in photos from the nineteenth century when they were all B/W? Who's still buying this retvrn hucksterism?
Current photos of old objects. I admit I had the same question based on the caption included in the graph itself, which just says "photos."
> a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
The graph is from a study of objects held in the collection of a museum, not photographs by year they were taken. It says so in this article.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
Yeah you're right, I jumped the gun there. On the other hand, color trends of science museum exhibits are a cherry-picked example. "Culture Critic"'s whole shtick is to put a photo of a modernist building next to an ornamental one, and this just seems to be that, but with a superficial layer of scientism.
Personally I think the collection used is pretty good, not perfect but not cherry picking. I find CC's explanation unsatisfactory and loose, mostly placing the blame on philosphers that predate the recent trend of less color by decades or millennia, and skipping over well known major events in the history of color fashion. But I do agree that ornamentation and color are less common today in architecture and product design than they were in prior decades, and than they were for much of history. Except perhaps for a narrow band of blue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Male_Renunciation
The loss of color is concerning, but something I find interesting is the image the author chooses to illustrate Loos' quote, "We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." I would argue the building pictured falls short of this goal in important ways. A lot of contemporary architecture lacks the modernist commitment to flat planes, pure volumes, etc. and adds lazy and useless decorative/textural elements. The building pictured would look better if it was less adorned! (But even better with some color)
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
"The answer isn’t just about fashion or materials, but is rooted in a much older understanding of the relationship between color and truth."
Nah it's just fashion and materials. Even if you just look at apples product line, you can see they went from colorful plastic to monochrome metal and glass to how reintroducing colors to several of their product lines.
People want so badly for there to be underlying, global conspiracy that they see it everywhere.
Not sure it's worth a whole blog post, but I think we have more ways to express ourselves than ever... the color hasn't gone, it's moved.
I might resell my house or my car but my PC is a like looking into a rainbow supernova. My clothes have patterns and prints that weren't even technically possible 100 years ago. I can go buy paint for my walls at any hardware store that would cost a fortune during the renaissance. I can print any artwork I want at home at amazing quality or pay a little more for an even better pro print. I've got a number of screens in my house that can reproduce more colors than I can differentiate.
The world is more colorful than ever, I don't think we have to point to the tired car examples or temporary trends in home decoration or filmmaking and claim something's missing.
What I find infuriating is to see colors stripped from children’s toys and clothes, especially by Northern Europe brands. Those dull beige taupe tones might attract parents but I’m sure that they bring little joy and stimulation to children.
Adolf Loos designed some incredibly sumptuous interiors. They aren't lacking in color. Methinks he's being used unjustly as a scapegoat to grind some axe. To me, this essay is an example of "slop."
To double down on that notion—the baroque rococo interiors that the author idolises at the end were the exclusive purview of the astonishingly wealthy, in no small part because of how expensive they were to implement. Accordingly they were equated with absolutism and corruption.
It's hard to decide how much of the author's position is born from ignorance versus how much of it is born from disingenuousness.
Color is the last vestige of ornamentation[1].
Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.
In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.
1. https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
I play boardgames. I am also visually imppaired. So for me functionality is a massive issue. Readability is a massive issue. Being "pretty" is not an issue.
In this class of games, it's common for a game to be printed, possibly have several printings, and then go out of print. For particularly sticky games, they may come back with a reprint or redesign years later. And I've noticed going back decades that the redesign almost always replaces bold, functional, high-contrast designs for low-contrast, "realistic", "pretty' designs. Examples:
- Brass: original [1] vs redesign [2]
- Titan: original [3] vs redesign [4]
- Saint Petersburg: original [5] vs redesign [6]
I don't know why this is but part of it comes down to people wanting to add "value" by changing things rather than just reprinting them. But why go "realistic"? I think there's a pervasive idea in this space that "realism" is good. So that's a trend.
Cars go beyond color. Cars become a white or other neutral color because it's the least potentially "offensive". Car makers want the largest possible market. Plus companies like Hertz want this kind of car. But look at cars from the 1950s through 1980s and on top of color you have a lot of cosmetic design choices that we don't have now because they're less aerodynamic but, more importantly, cheaper.
In a way, the car ceased to become an object of expression. Instead for many people it's just pure utility. So the designs became utilitarian. You may disagree because people are very opinionated on what cars they prefer but I think that just expresses brand preferences not aesthetic choices.
Chain restaurants also exhibit this trend. Compare McDonald's from the 1980s vs now. A lot of fast food restaurants are now much harder to distinguish.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4265429/brass-lancashire
[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1278376/brass-lancashire
[3]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/82323/titan
[4]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4869350/titan
Do you have original and redesign mixed up on Brass? 1's ID is much higher than 2's, not sure if BGG does sequential IDs but I think I've noticed in the past that they seem to.
Either way, I'd never even consider buying 1 (the redesign?), it's nearly impossible to "read" that board, while 2 (the original?) looks immediately inviting, without being at-all ugly.
Colors aren’t cool. You know what’s cool? Clean perfect lines, rich texture and materials. Imagine a cube of polished concrete stone, with a wood plank sanded and stained to a warm perfection, basking in the glow of a square window at a perfect 45 degree angle. Beautiful, it can move you to tears.
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
go outside!
I've been interested in the subconscious emotional response to colour for a long time now and have a kind of autistic obsession with the colour selections of myself and others (especially the colour of clothes). None of what I'm about to say is backed up by any reading or research I've done on this topic. This is all my opinion and experience, but I guess its somewhat topical and some people might find it interesting.
Many years back I used to practice social skills and pickup. I realised quite quickly while learning how to socialise that colour is one of the more important ways to alter how others perceive you prior to knowing you.
Specifically, greys and blacks were generally a bad choice and tended to signal low-confidence or a lack of character. There is an exception here for formal wear, but generic fashion choices like a black tshirt, grey shorts and black shoes will make you look devoid of personality. Always try to wear some colour if dressing casually and if you want to appear more friendly soft blues, greens and pinks I think are some of the most inviting colours.
Hot pink was one of my favourite colours to cautiously add when socialising as a guy in a casual setting because it can be quite an interesting colour choice. It's far less aggressive than a strong red, but almost equally as striking. And its purpose is more confusing (and therefore interesting) than other colours since it could both be a sign of a confident heterosexual guy, or an outwardly gay guy. For this reason I've found hot pink is a good colour to add if meeting girls in a casual setting because it can be initially sexually neutralising while also an indicator of confidence (being too sexually forward is generally a bad strategy).
However, in a formal settings whites and blacks are generally what you'll want to go with. Beige colours can also work, but might make you look a bit old fashioned today. I thought the reaction Jordan Peterson got when he starting wearing very colourful and striking suits was interesting because it confirmed a lot of my speculation around how people view colour in formal wear. It's very, very difficult to balance class with colour. If you want to appear classy it's almost required that you stick with whites and blacks.
I personally suspect the world is losing colour because of the above two points – we associate class with neutral colours (blacks and whites generally) and strong colours can impose strong emotional responses which we might want to avoid (generally speaking anyway).
My guess is that if you saw a brightly coloured home or car you will have a sense that the person who owns that thing has a lack of class and a strong colour might even suggest something negative or unintended about the owner. For this reason you might be tempted to just stick with something neutral to avoid this. This would be especially true for colourful items of low value because creating a strong emotional reaction around an item of little value it's probably going be perceived as overwhelmingly negative. Hence why some teen driving fast in a bright red but inexpensive car can be aggravating, while someone else driving fast in a bright red Ferrari while not especially classy is still likely to be far less negatively perceived.
And beyond the class aspect, I'd suspect the lack of colour we see today is a reflection of our lower self-confidence both as individuals and culturally. I suspect people increasingly don't want to stand out or make an impression in public, and culturally in the West we're less confident and perhaps don't believe our public buildings deserve to be as striking or grand as they were in the past.
I don't really know why blacks and whites suggest class either. I suspect that's a cultural thing that could change, but perhaps that would first require us to be confident enough to make an emotional impression. Perhaps too much confidence is viewed as unclassy today, while being timid and softly spoken is generally seen more positively. Either way, even if you believe the world should be more colourful, I wouldn't suggest leading the way on that in your own life – at least not if you care about how others will perceive you.
> The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
I get this feeling when I visit certain places with beton brute architecture, and I always wonder what kind of suffering did the architect go through to design something like that?
Colour is a form of bling and bling is tasteless.
Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.
Translation: my subjective taste is high and those who differ are vulgar.
It is not.
If you feel so, it is a massive red flag that your brain is in a depressive state.
Source: fixed my mental demons and now the world is suddenly full of color and life, as if I was a child again