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Has the world become less colourful?

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Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#191

Post by TomSwirly »

jader201 wrote: post #132
donkeyd wrote: post #89

I'm a man and I like colors. I have a red car, red shoes and colorful jackets. None of them are especially remarkable, they just have colors on them. I get remarks from colleagues about my shoes, I get remarks from random people on the street about my jacket. These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff. I feel like pa…

> I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people I think there is a small minority of people that either want attention, or don't mind it. The rest of the world wants to avoid drawing attention to themselves. This is true for both positive and negative attention. I don't think it's so much about what others think, I think it's just that attention is uncomfortable for most people, and they do what t…

But when I grew up in the 1960s and 70s everyone wore bright colors. I don't think the number of extroverts has changed particularly.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#192

Post by Theodores »

marcosdumay wrote: post #166
Theodores wrote: post #2

Colour is not driven by fashion directly. There is always a technical innovation or regulatory change. The Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint. An ex…

> We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.

You have piqued my interest, oil paints are going to be made safe for schools and I now want to know how they formulate all the colours.

From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#193

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

donkeyd wrote: post #89

I'm a man and I like colors. I have a red car, red shoes and colorful jackets. None of them are especially remarkable, they just have colors on them. I get remarks from colleagues about my shoes, I get remarks from random people on the street about my jacket. These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff. I feel like pa…

I'm a guy, and I also like colors. But I tend to like low-lightness, high-saturation colors. Just because it's dark doesn't mean it's not colorful! I'm currently wearing a black & dark-blue Hawaiian-print shirt!

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#194

Post by fariszr »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #178
jkqwzsoo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading a feature/native advertisement about Lenovo's ThinkPad focus groups a while back (I think on Ars or The Verge) that had a similar conclusion. People would go crazy over a red or white ThinkPad in focus groups, but would never buy one because they couldn't see themselves as "that person" with the red laptop at a meeting. Lenovo did make both a red and white x100e a long while ago, but those were mor…

I am "that person" and am quite disappointed that I can't own a lime green MacBook Air.

I mean, skins exist!

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#195

Post by jabl »

Macha wrote: post #31
ThePadawan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a self-perpetuating problem. Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. (I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of…

> Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. There's definitely location/cultural variety here, people would worry a white car wouldn't sell, due to the increased visibility of dirt and scratches, so only gets 5% of sales here. The top colours here are silver (24%), black (22%) and blue (17%, mostly darker shades). I'…

Over here, it feels like white has become a much more common car color over the past 5(?) years or so. It used to be almost non-existent outside things like rental cars etc. but nowadays it's really common.

As for showing dirt/scratches/dents, from what I've read black is the worst actually, followed by other very dark colors. Best is relatively light gray, brownish/beige kind of colors.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#196

Post by marcosdumay »

Theodores wrote: post #192
marcosdumay wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.

You have piqued my interest, oil paints are going to be made safe for schools and I now want to know how they formulate all the colours. From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.

I don't know all the details, some were pretty hidden. I just looked because I saw a "non-toxic" label and doubted it.

I remember the dies that I could understand are mostly organic (and thus, may have a limited lifetime). There were many that I gave-up understanding the composition.

Anyway, I brought those in 2013. Things may have improved.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#198

Post by ilaksh »

fallinghawks wrote: post #140
chrismorgan wrote: post #94

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in India (mainly Hyderabad and Kolkata), and can report that India is much more colourful than Australia. Very garishly so, to my eyes. In clothing, building paint, night-time building lighting (… I found myself sometimes wishing coloured LEDs hadn’t been invented), just about everything imaginable. Weddings can be almost painful in the saturation of colour. But Indian cities are also e…

I went a little ways into Mexico (Tijuana and Ensenada) and bright colors were so ubiquitous and distracting it was hard for me to find necessary stuff like street signs and business signs. I was looking for a certain business which I was assured I couldn't miss. I drove past it several times, but just couldn't see it because of all the other stuff visually shouting at me.

I lived in Tijuana and Ensenada for a few years and although there may be somewhat more color in Mexico, it is not much, and overall I felt the design fashion to be fairly similar to San Diego where I grew up.

Re: Has the world become less colourful?

#199

Post by ilaksh »

Amazing how most of the people in this thread are denying that trends exist or that they are influenced by them.

The thing about fashion though is that it's subconscious. You would not know it affected you unless you are very meta-cognizant in this particular way. ( Which people should educate and train themselves about subtle cognitive biases.)

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