91–100 of 117 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grown up in China and most popular pencils were coded in dark green made by Zhonghua. https://img3.doubanio.com/lpic/s9122591.jpg Yellow ones are rare there.
Does the color green have a meaning in China?
But I doubt that's what they're going for with the pencils.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Italy, quality in everyday pencils used to be associated to Staedtler, and their pencils were striped black/yellow.
What you are describing are Koh-i-noor pencils. Staedtler pencils are blue, with the black top.
The overwhelming majority is black/yellow. Maybe they geo-segment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grown up in China and most popular pencils were coded in dark green made by Zhonghua. https://img3.doubanio.com/lpic/s9122591.jpg Yellow ones are rare there.
Does the color green have a meaning in China?
You can see bamboo leaves in the zoomed-in version:
http://g.search.alicdn.com/img/bao/uploaded/i4/i1/740891439/...
Growing up in India, all the pencils I used were red and black striped made by Nataraj. I remember seeing yellow pencils in western movies though. https://cwpencils.com/collections/nataraj/products/621-hb-pe...
Probably the most common colour in New Zealand is that red and black stripe as well, but usually made by Staedtler[0]. Some other brands also copy the same style[1]. Seems like we need another article on Why Pencils Are Red And Black. [0] https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg [1] e.g. https://i.imgur.com/mmN943m.jpg
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It's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently. We have these, just for example: https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab... https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...
Definitely not just US. I'm from Lithuania and these were the pencils we all used [0]. That was around 1992 and later, so could have been a relic from Soviets. Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes. [0] - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-b...
It was probably an H grade rather than HB. Pencils in the US stores often come out smudgy to me ever since then...
So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against G…
> So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." Bright? According to the article, the pencils were painted yellow to symbolize China, because their graphite was sourced from Siberia. (Seems like a stretch, but that's what it says...) What does brightn…
Bright color to stand out, as opposed to dark colors hiding imperfections. Another stretch, perhaps.
So the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against G…
This reminds me of a post on HN where someone put a picture of a Duck on a wireless charger, giving it a brand identity and the charger was selling like crazy. Users identified with that brand over a charger that was brandless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently. We have these, just for example: https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab... https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...
Definitely not just US. I'm from Lithuania and these were the pencils we all used [0]. That was around 1992 and later, so could have been a relic from Soviets. Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes. [0] - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-b...
Looking it up, apparently this has something to do with pencils being manufactured in early (1920s) USSR by an American entrepreneur:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer#Career
https://i.imgur.com/vpObXqU.jpg
Eventually the Soviet government bought the entire operation from him, and thenceforth it became this:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE...
And they probably just continued to use yellow, because why not?
Explains my confusion with early internet "cliparts" and icons being always in yellow. I am sure most non westerns might be equally confused. Pencil meant black and red for us in India - Natraj FTW
It's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently. We have these, just for example: https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab... https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...
The standard pencil we had at school was just plain red with a straight cut top so you could see the graphite - I think a staedtler HB (bit like [1] but didn’t have the ‘minerva’ brand name on it). A lot of automatically marked tests needed 2B pencils to mark the answer sheet and we almost always used the red and black striped ones like your link.
1. https://www.supplyme.co.nz/shop/Stationery/Pens+Pencils+Mark...
