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Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

artsy.net

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Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#111
post #98
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can an animal give brand identity? Do you have a link to that post? I'm curious.

Because it is a duck, and that duck is cute.

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#112

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…

It's an adjective. An adjective not uncommonly associated with the hues in question. It's also not uncommon as a turn of phrase in english to say, "people are distracted by the newest bright and shiny object." So I took the opportunity.

Is this... a real question? This seems like a fake question.

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#113
post #63

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…

I thought this story was going in a different direction, where you had replaced Powerset's logo with one having bright colors, and then it started winning.

Well the google logo is a bright colorful child's toy, as opposed to ... well... look it up. Powerset has branding so bad I didn't wanna see it either.

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#114

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…

That could have been because people have learned to associate Google with good search results, because of the 'quality of the goods'

I mean, at the time certainly Google was beating the breaks off Yahoo. But for wikipedia, Powerset was doing things that at the time were unimaginable. We were reliably disambiguating cases like "who did Dick Cheney shoot" from "who shot Dick Cheney" and showing those off.

So while I agree folks should have a positive vibe with the brand, it was kinda overwhelming when we put random recall results under a google logo and lost to them.

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#115
post #18

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

American that just recently learned about Indian pencils- they're so much better than pencils we have here! Though I'm partial to the Apsara Regal Gold instead of the traditional black and red Nataraj

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's an adjective. An adjective not uncommonly associated with the hues in question. It's also not uncommon as a turn of phrase in english to say, "people are distracted by the newest bright and shiny object." So I took the opportunity. Is this... a real question? This seems like a fake question.

It's not a fake question, it's question your assertion (which comes with no citation) regarding the origin of the colour yellow used in pencils, which contradicts the origin story described in the article.

Re: Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)

#117
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an adjective. An adjective not uncommonly associated with the hues in question. It's also not uncommon as a turn of phrase in english to say, "people are distracted by the newest bright and shiny object." So I took the opportunity. Is this... a real question? This seems like a fake question.

It's not a fake question, it's question your assertion (which comes with no citation) regarding the origin of the colour yellow used in pencils, which contradicts the origin story described in the article.

I'm sorry, but which part of calling the color yellow "bright" conflicts with the article's presented content in any way?
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