Comment by IneffablePigeon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IneffablePigeon | Hacker News Reader

IneffablePigeon

I found the source article much more illuminating: https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...

I don't find the headline graph that convincing. Firstly, it's only based on items in this museum's collection, which is quite a biased set as it says in the article.

Secondly - if you actually look at the colour chart closely, you can see that although there is a trend of more grayscale objects in the collection, within the coloured section there's also a trend away from almost everything being some shade of yellow, orange or brown towards a much broader range of hues. Blues, greens and purples seem much better represented.

It looks to me like ~70% of the colours were basically "brown" in the 1800s, and now ~40% are white/gray/black. Seems more a reflection of modern objects being made more out of metal and plastic and less out of wood than anything else. Again, this is putting aside the clear bias in the samples here.

I'm sure there are trends going on (and the car colour one seems legit to me) but I think this overblows it a little. Fashion ebbs and flows.

I think there is also another bias in the samples they have in that a lot of the older items have developed some sort of patina/rust/aging. That tends to skew them in to the brown, dark grey and generally muted colors. If you watch the video there are a number of items that are old gears, chains and machinery.

The video in that article illustrates your point quite nicely by displaying the palette at each point in time. The early years are dominated by wood grain colors and gold. I'd wager gold being overrepresented in a sample based on museum items.

It then switches away from wood to more grayscale plastics. Until the 60s, when brightly colored plastics take over.

And only quite recently has "billet" stainless steel and aluminium become a "common" material for consumer goods (as opposed to types like die cast which don't have a finish that's usually left unpainted).

Both these materials require fairly advanced techniques to produce at scale. Firstly the actual materials themselves are fairly hard to get good alloys of.

Secondly, they are hard to machine well, especially stainless steel, which really needs extremely rigid machinery and high speed carbine tooling. Not only that, but to machine the shapes of things that would previously have been plastic, you really need CNC, which again, only recently has become economical for many consumer goods.

Scientific instruments and tools meanwhile would be using brass, as it's much more amenable to machining. Milling a brass billet on a manual mill is a joy and results are good, stainless is a misery, and the results are horrible.

And as to why plastic things were so garish a few decades ago? Maybe firstly they were new and it was unusual to even be able to have such colours. Early plastics were ahead of the dye chemistry, so they were much more "natural".

Secondly, it's actually hard to have good silver finishes (you can have grey): many of the high end products were silver, but it was usually a coating which would come off and reveal the milky plastic. White is also hard because UV stabilization was also not as mature, so it would yellow quickly[1]. It was easier to have a solid colour, and the brighter the better in terms of hiding moulding defects.

[1] It also seems only fairly recently that you can get the really deep gloss jet black plastic, rather than the dull, very dark grey like a cassette tape body.

To non-technical people, polished stainless, aluminum, and chrome are indistinguishable, and chrome was utterly dominant in the automotive field before the 1980s.

Automotive yes, and standard profiles like tubes, but not smaller consumer goods because it's very expensive to tool up for a chromed item due to the finish needed on the substrate (without CNC, remember). For example a chrome case for a telephone handset would be brutally expensive compared to plastic (until metallised plastic was developed).

I think it's high time for "garishness" to make a comeback, at least in the realm of handheld electronics. It's exasperating, the belief product designers have that every phone or remote control has to be of such a color that one can't tell the devices apart or spot one of them from across the room.

In my naive observation, another explanation is that modern lights also tend to lean toward colder blueish hues than they did in ye-olden days, that were dominated by warmer, lower Kelvin hues more similar to that of candle light. Even looking back at photos from the 60s, interior lights were generally warmer than those of today.

Also consider the aging process or capture medium of the photo samples from time past.

Also, brown and yellow used to be much easier and cheaper shades of paint to make vs whites, blues, or reds (depending on the material to be painted).

For example, stop signs in the US, while always intended to be red, were originally painted yellow, because there wasn't a red paint cheap or durable enough at the time the traffic standards were developed.

As technology caught up and new paints/dyes developed, the yellow signs were replaced with red ones.

Open your eyes...

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we eventually have to ban such accounts, because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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