Art, Mystery And Posh Pigments In “Sacre Bleu“

via npr
“...These days you can walk into any drugstore and buy a cheap pack of markers in all the colors of the rainbow. That makes it hard to appreciate just how rare and precious blue pigment was, not so long ago.

“The translation of sacre bleu is sacred blue,” says [Christopher] Moore. “In medieval times, the church said that if you are going to portray the Virgin Mary's cloak, it has to be in a certain shade of blue. And that blue must be ultramarine, because ultramarine blue is permanent. It doesn't go black or fade as organic colors do. And that is made essentially from crushed lapis lazuli, which is only available in Afghanistan. If you think about the 11th and 12th century, trying to get a stone from Afghanistan to Europe, for years and right up into the 19th century, was more valuable, weight for weight, than gold…”
Read more about Christopher Moore's novel here.

10 Colors That Faded Away

Appealing to my fascination with color — this graphic is from Listomania: A World of Fascinating Facts in Graphic Detail .

Image of the Day: Sugar Maples

The sugar maples are on Penn State campus are turning brilliant!

Color Swatch Door

via a two-winged fairy, Design Sponge, and Gizmodo
Architects are designers, too, and Armin Blasbichler’s home in South Tyrol is a great example. The floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows are designed as Pantone-like swatches that reflect the colors of the landscape outside.
See more here.

The Subjectivity of Color Perception

via brain pickings
“How do ‘normal’ people see ‘normal’ color? Turns out, the answer isn’t as black and white. From the fine folks behind BBC’s excellent Horizon series — who have also pondered the nature of reality, the age-old tension between science and religion, how music works, what time is, and how money came to dominate the world — comes Do You See What I See, a fascinating look at the subjectivity and divergence of how we each see the world and the surprising power colors can have on our mood, cognition, emotion, and entire lives…”
Read the rest here.

The Old Man of the Lake

pointed out by my son
“About 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, a volcano named Mount Mazama, located in present-day Oregon, erupted, leaving behind a big crater.  Over time, water from rain and snowfall filled the hole, and Crater Lake was born.  And Crater Lake is not like most other lakes.  As seen here from above, it is a deep, undisturbed blue, having no natural rivers leading in or out of it, no fish indigenous to it (although it has since been artificially stocked), etc.  Over the course of 250 years, its water -- cold, due to the elevation (at 6,148 feet, Crater Lake is over a mile above sea level) -- is replaced via an ongoing cycle of evaporation and precipitation. But what makes Crater Lake truly unique is a solitary piece of wood, pictured right, nicknamed the Old Man of the Lake…’
Read the rest here.

Seamless Studio Pattern Power

via colourlovers
“It truly is magical what you all are able to create using simple shapes and only five colors . . . check out the Showcase to see some examples of the wonderful patterns being created with Seamless Studio. Or check it out for yourself, download a FREE 15 Day Trial of Seamless Studio, here.”
Find out more about the application here.

The Color of: Oliver Sacks

via notcot
“Fung Kwok Pan has developed this slick little piece of code that allows you to enter a search query, then grabs 80 Flickr photos related to your query, then makes a composite of the photos, showing you the color of whatever you entered. It’s pretty neat to watch this thing work.”
Try it yourself here.

Color Communication: When You Say X, Your Designer Hears This

via colourlovers

Image from
Hearing Color: Neil Harbisson, Cyborg

“Let me paint a picture for you. You’ve just started working with a new designer. You sat down with that person, explained all of your dreams for the design, and left the meeting feeling like you were really on the same page. Then the next time you meet with them, they present a design that is completely different than what you expected. It’s not necessarily a bad design, but it is definitely different than what you described. Sound familiar? This is what I like to call a “lost in translation” moment. And it’s exactly what inspired me to create this guide on translating “design talk.” Why is there a disconnect?…”
Read the rest here.

Odd Color Names Offer a Primer in Marketing

via nytimes

“If you heard the words “Tempest,’ ‘Turbulence’ and ‘Tornado Watch,’ you might head for the basement — fast. Paint manufacturers want you to head for the living room. In a redoubled effort to capture consumers’ attention in this sputtering economic recovery, some paint companies are hoping to distinguish their brands with names that tell a story, summon a memory or evoke an emotion — even a dark one — as long as they result in a sale. What they do not do is reveal the color…”

Read the rest here.

Smithsonian: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

I recently spent a few morning hours exploring the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum with my daughter-in-law and wife. We took our time wandering through the two current exhibitions “Set in Style: The Jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels” and “Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay” as well as the gift shop. It was interesting to see the many influences of the world on the designers in the exhibitions, and then back again as their designs influenced the world. I was particularly impressed by the Chinese Magician pocket watch, the transforming zipper jewelry, and the Bronx Cocktail bracelet. The old ledgers documenting the design process were a very nice addition as well.


I hope someday to visit the the Museum’s Drue Heinz Study Center for Drawings and Prints which is currently closed. It houses more than 160,000 works of art dating from the Renaissance to the present related to the history of European and American art and design. The collection includes designs for architecture, decorative arts, gardens, interiors, ornament, jewelry, theater, textiles, graphic and industrial design, as well as the fine arts. You can browse through their holdings here.

The gift shop is a visual feast as well, with such wonders as the Hazelnut Box with Miniature Knife and Yoshida The Crow Model Airplane. “The Crow design was the first such model plane to ever be built and flown in Japan. It dates from 1889, when its inventor based his model on the crow’s wing span after studying them in flight.”

Sleep May Restore Color Perception

via colourlovers
“Color perception drifts away from neutrality during wakefulness and is restored during sleep, suggests a research abstract presented in at SLEEP 2010, the 24th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC. Results indicate that prior wakefulness caused the color gray to be classified as having a slightly but significantly greenish tint. Overnight sleep restored perception to achromatic equilibrium so that gray was perceived as gray...”
Read the rest here.

Cocktail Colors Seen Through the Microscope

Gin & Tonic

via colourlovers
“BevShot images are made by first crystallizing the drink of choice on a lab slide. Using a standard light microscope with a camera attached, the light source is polarized and passed through the crystal. This creates the colors we see…”
Read the rest here.

Indigo: The Colour that Seduced the World

Indigo by Catherine E McKinley
will be published in August 2011

via delancyplace
“Until the most recent times, color dyes were rare and precious commodities upon which power and fortunes were built. Indigo, the brilliant blue dye made from plants, was one of America's slavery-based cash crops. But long before it was exported by America, indigo dye had been one of the world's great treasures for thousands of years. Referred to by some as blue gold, it caught the imagination of connoisseurs, and merchants and colonialists with its power to bewitch and its transcendent beauty — and the value and demand for indigo became ungovernable. It sparked bitter trade wars, and touched off impassioned European and North American legislation and political debate and became known as The Devil’s Dye.”
Read the rest here.

Geometry of Circles: Philip Glass + Sesame Street

via brain pickings
“…In 1979, the makers of Sesame Street commissioned Philip Glass to compose music for a series of four unnumbered animation pieces titled Geometry of Circles, designed as a primer for visual thinking — something at the core of both Sesame Street itself and Jim Henson’s original vision that predated his creation of The Muppets. The combination, beautiful and eloquent in a multisensory way, feeds into my obsession with synesthesia and various visualizations of music.”
Read the rest, and watch one of the videos here.

Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling Color: Synesthesia Pt. 2

via imprint
“[Part II digs] into a hot-topic among scientists in recent years: is synesthesia useful to those who have it? What can studying it yield?
Read part two here.

Seeing Color (and Hearing, and Smelling It)

via imprint
“The number 1, for example, is a brilliant and bright white, like someone shining a flashlight into my eyes. Five is a clap of thunder or the sound of waves crashing against rocks. Thirty-seven is lumpy like porridge, while 89 reminds me of falling snow…”
Read the rest here.

Americhrome

via imprint
“Did you know the United States has an official color palette? True story. It does. There’s a swatch system representing every irritating, boring color you see in official capacity, from the brown of a rest area to the green of a street sign to the brown of the military uniforms.
Read more at the Morning News.

The FD&C Color Palette

via idsn

“As designers, we know color is important. But when food is your medium, color can be powerful enough to influence taste—and affect health. Say hello to Blue No. 1, Yellow No. 5, and Red No. 40. These numbers make up part of an artificial color palette approved by the United States’ Food and Drug Administration. First introduced in 1906, the FDA’s Pure Food and Drug Act (and later the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act) was put in place to ensure the safety and wholesomeness of food products. Before this, more than eighty dyes were used to color food, without regulation—the same dye could be used to color both clothing and candy. Currently, the FD&C color palette features seven colors that can be used in the production of food, along with two additional colors for limited use. . . ”

Read the rest here.

4CP | Four Color Process adventures deep inside the comic book

via letterology


[From the 4CP blog] “. . . Lately, I've been trying to master the relationship between dot patterns and the finite color value options of vintage four-color process. Typically there were only three basic values for cyan, magenta, and yellow: 100%, 50%, and 25%, which were combined to create the optical illusion of 45-65 colors. (70% was also used sometimes.) These values account for the way a constituent color may appear as large or small dots or as what looks like a solid color with dots knocked out of it.

When you blow up process printing, you eliminate nearly all of the intended colors. There is no illusion of anything anymore, and no human intention behind what you’re seeing. It’s just the rudimentary building blocks of an inexpensive mechanical printing process, thrown into accidental relationships at the microscopic level.”


Discover more images here.