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.
Why is the world losing color?
61–70 of 309 posts
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#62It'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…
> 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)
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#63Colour 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.
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#64I 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.
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#65There'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."
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#67It'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…
> 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 bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend.
IndeedRe: Why is the world losing color?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#69One 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 stat…
> 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
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”.
Re: Why is the world losing color?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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. :)