Why is the world losing color?
culture-critic.com
culture-critic.com
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.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
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.
Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media since the 1800s. You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease, but one does not exist. At least, the "explosion" the data shows is a very minor increase that does not affect the overall pattern.
The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.
Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.
Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.
I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.
The data shows an explosion of "new" colours in the 1960s, although the trend never stopped. Technology is still no doubt the answer – including the explosion in the black to white spectrum. We aren't limited to natural colours or colours, period, like we once were.
I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.
Also, pop art.
What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.
This is meaningless.
"When many things are different, everything is the same".
Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing.
"000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because in the second sequence they're different and in the first they're all the same? Great, you just discovered sets and the axiom of choice.
We are literally discussing the difference within the sets! Obviously the second sequence is more diverse.
First, I thought your argument was going somewhere but then it took this turn.
I would agree with the first part and then argue that before the synthetics-revolution things were mostly just shades of browns(which is a type of dark unsaturated orange). Except for the upper classes who could afford the expensive colors. Now that color is cheap and normalized, it lost (some) of its allure. Not being able to signal your wealth anymore.
Now adding just a conjecture of mine; Now that 'clean' is still somewhat more expensive(upper classes still being able to afford more cleanliness by using other peoples labor), minimal textures(not literal textures but design-wise) are more attractive because it displays your wealth. Plain-white being the easiest to see blemishes on. With black being easier look unblemished. Also, 'tasteful' color arrangements will still signal your class somewhat due to requiring cultural knowledge.
"00000000qq000000000I0000000"
Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?
"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"
Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.
And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.
It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
> Possessing prominent and varied colors.
If you want a more academic source; try https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/courses/120/Lectures/... slides 13 & 14. Colour isn't some random distraction, the human vision system uses it to help decide what to focus on. Then you get things like peacocks where they go all in on using colourful visualisations to attract attention.
Why not? Different colors stand out. Even gray on black does. They are just not colorful.
Look at this painting - [0]. Are you telling me the red tone doesn't stand out?
[0] - https://largemodernart.com/products/original-abstract-art-oi...
Which colour stands out here? https://business.cap.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/cap_ex...
> When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
My example is clearly a colorful painting, very vibrant, yet certain tones stand out. What you said is literally wrong. It's neither simple nor obvious. Spell out what you meant. Your counter example isn't obvious either.
I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.
This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).
But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.
However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.
It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge". https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d...
> I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff.
It's now permeated everything, so it's hard to not watch stuff, as it's everywhere, with few exceptions.
The whole show, like everything in the past decade or so, was dark and washed out (except for some space FX parts, where at least some colors were saturated, sometimes). This lasted up until the last two episodes, where for plot reasons[0], some protagonists found themselves onboard a ship from TNG-era shows (1980s - 2000s), pulled straight from a museum, which means the set was recreated as it was on old shows, complete with the lighting. From that scene onwards through the final episode, as it jumped between that one special set and every other dark and gray scene, I had proof in front of me that scenes in modern shows can be properly lit, they just aren't, and it's an active choice[1].
Importantly, this scene wasn't a one-off gimmick that risked coming out too bright on normal people's HDR-enabled TV screens. The set involved was, per the showrunner, pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the entire season, and they burned most of the season's budget on perfecting it[2]. Them being able to light it well (and have it coexist with every other badly-lit scene) only proves there's no technical obstacle involved - that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
--
[0] - Hard to navigate around a major spoiler and highlight of the era in the franchise.
[1] - Actually, I can't give this scene enough justice. But given how massive moment that was for people following the franchise, I'll just provide a link to the video (SPOILER WARNING): https://youtu.be/t-mY4Xbjyn8?t=42 -- watch in max quality; compare okay-ish exterior CG early on, observe how dark and washed out scenes with people are - and this is literally how the entire season (and really, entire show) was until that point... or just scroll to 2:27, and then on a perfect cue - "computer, lights!" - observe how next 30 seconds reveal that everything could've been properly lit from the start, but for some non-tech reason, it wasn't.
[2] - Most of that was eaten up by casting very specific people, but the set itself was damn expensive too.
It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.
Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.
But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.
It is. The article you link even begins:
> So many TV shows and movies now
That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.
You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.
It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
You're absolutely wrong, it happened to video games too. The industry defended it by saying it made games look more "realistic", but have since backed off after consumers revolted and dubbed the aesthetic "piss filter."
Started in the mid 00s, went strong for about a decade and still persists to a lesser degree today. Only designers like it, consumers broadly hate it.
I can't speak to video games, but of course it would make sense it would apply to dramatic video games as well.
Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.
It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.
Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.
According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.
The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen different vendors over a year-long post-production cycle. This can still work when you have a director like a James Cameron who's hands-on throughout the process and has top-notch VFX director and cinematography skills. But that's not the norm. This creates systemic incentives for directors, cinematographers and LDs to lens flat, unexpressive shots. Because if there's not consistent, hand-on creative direction over the whole process, the editor and colorist are left trying to stitch together a bunch of shots and elements that weren't created to exist cohesively in the same frame. I suspect not managing this complexity is how visual disasters like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania happen.
Sadly, there's no reason it has to be this way. Technically, it's entirely possible to create a VFX-heavy movie that looks like every part of every frame was lensed by a master like Bernardo Bertolucci. There's nothing required that's even that hard or expensive compared to modern VFX blockbuster complexity or budgets. I think the reason we haven't seen it yet is two-fold: today's top producers, directors and cinematographers rarely have the new and diverse skill sets required in one person and none of the few with the skills and experience has had both the creative intention and budget to do it. I'm actually hopeful that maybe in the next few years someone like a Nolan or Cameron will decide to try to take it to this level as an aspiration. Currently, many of those with the budgets and cred are choosing to address the challenge by reverting to creating effects with practical sets and in-camera techniques. This can avoid the problem but it's looking backward instead of embracing the challenge and doing the pioneering work of figuring out how to push through and solve it. Whoever does it may discover all-new creative and expressive capabilities.
But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable.
They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras.
We didn't "forget" how to "make movies look like movies". We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom. And like always, people will disagree over aesthetic choices.
I totally understand what you mean, though, about lighting vs grading, and where what gets done, but there are good arguments for doing more with grading rather than in the lighting. It ultimately allows the editor+grader+director to make a lot more choices, and that's generally a good thing. You say "color grading in post should be for small tweaks" but I respectfully disagree. And obviously, there isn't even a choice when it comes to the outdoors in daytime -- it has to be done in the grading.
As I mentioned, the problem is a strange lack of visual diversity in looks. I'm all for increasing artistic and expressive range and I'm not one of those pining for old-school processes. As you said, film had and still has a lot of limitations. Having been involved in both pre-digital film production and analog video production, we had to spend stupid amounts of effort to avoid or overcome the inherent technical limitations we were saddled with. It was incredibly frustrating and I'd spend time dreaming about a future where those technical (and chemical) limitations no longer haunted us. I guess that's why I'm sort of dismayed that so many creators aren't utilizing the truly incredible technical fidelity even consumer gear provides today.
I should also have mentioned I don't fully agree with every point made in the video I linked but it is a terrific way to highlight that the issue isn't technical limitations of digital production. It's either an explicit creative choice to settle for visual blandness or the result of not making explicit choices leading to an ambient default sameness.
> We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom.
That's what I find delightful about today's best work. And I'm fine respecting different creative choices, as long as someone actually thought about it and made those choices intentionally because they believed it was the best realization of their unique vision. But it's also true that the range of looks in today's content isn't as wide as it should be. There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project. Or the recent epidemic of 'HDR-flat' desaturation. We can and should strive to do better - to think and create different and deploy the full palette of expression we're so fortunate to finally have at our fingertips. I want to see and celebrate a broad range of expressively unique, creatively opinionated looks - even ones I don't personally care for - whether created in-camera, in grading or even purely in CGI.
I should also add that there's still an element of technical limitation driving some of this default to visual conservatism. Sadly, inconsistent (and sometimes just broken) HDR implementations across consumer viewing platforms is a frustrating issue and I sympathize with colorists and mastering engineers prepping content for literally 200 different distribution formats. While technically-based, these issues are all the more tragic because there's no underlying reason it had to be such a shit show of uneven implementation. HDR, wide color gamuts and deep color spaces are all well-specified and purely in the digital domain. High-quality digital processing and conversion is inexpensive and built into even cheap HDMI encoder chips so even the cheapest consumer displays with limited capabilities should be able to map content created with higher color spaces and wide dynamic ranges so that they still broadly represent the creator's intent. Yet too many still fail to properly handle mapping HDR and WCG content.
Ha! Indeed. Yup, agreed on all points you've made.
Besides the obvious factors of time and budget, I think it's precisely the technical freedom we have that a lot of people simply don't know how to use. If we have 100x the visual possibilities now, it might also be fair to say that it requires 10x training to be able to use them well. I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
Agreed. Great creatives are still great (and still too rare). In addition to the lack of technical proficiency and creative aspiration, I also suspect there's an element of some directors/DPs on VFX blockbusters assuming all the sensational VFX elements in the frame simply overwhelm beautifully subtle, artistically expressive in-camera cinematography or maybe make it matter less. I can't really fault them for assuming that as it's sometimes at least somewhat true (for some viewers). But then I look at an extraordinary outlier example of VFX-soaked comic book movie lensed brilliantly like The Batman compared to a typically competent example like recent live action Spiderman and realize... nope, it still matters - it's just really hard to do well and integrate with VFX. (Some good comparison examples in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STynLl-2FqU).
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)
If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
My impression from the data is not that greyscale now dominates the physical environment, but that browns once dominated. Presumably because things like wood, copper, etc. once dominated the materials we engrossed ourselves in. As we've expanded the paints and other materials we live with, we've found much more balance.
I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.
But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.
Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.
When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.
(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)
Paint colors subtractively from light: you never get more light into a room when you're knocking out wavelengths rather then reflecting them. Whereas with whiter walls you always have the option of manipulating color by using colored lighting.
i find it cognitively exhausting to watch movies that are so dark that most times i cannot even see the eye color of the cast
I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that catch - and drain - our attention
Then again I'd probably be fine with a super duper wallpaper like this so perhaps we won't agree on some things such as having few colorful elements https://www.photowall.com/ee/memphis-piazza-panorama-wallpap...
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/vintage-bathroom-makeover-p...
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.
Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.
<marquee><blink>Indeed</blink></marquee>So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.
In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.
But overall I agree. If everything is uber-colorful, that can become just overwhelming. Also we are a lot more stimulated throughout the day with screen and movies and games. In the olden days you didn't have a smartphone with a colorful screen, so putting lots of colour in your house or your church made more sense.
I'd want less advertisement, and more thoughtful color choices throughout cities and digital spaces.
Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.
Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.
I saw some pictures from a house where everything was white. The walls were white, the tables and chairs were white, the pillows were white, lamps were white, etc. But I bet the owner didn't see it as everything being white, like I did. I bet that when they'd look at the same pictures, they'd see all the little details here and there that were not white, or not quite white enough. I imagine them being in a constant state of stress over the non-white blemishes.
I don't know them, I just saw the pictures, so I don't truly know how they feel, I could be just imagining things. But my gut feeling is that someone with a home like that is not at ease with themselves.
I don't think I'd ever want something all that monochrome for myself. To me, subdued isn't about monochrome so much as limiting the noise. I don't even mind a sharp contrast, such as a colorful photo/painting. It's what I can only describe as visual noise that gets me. Especially with patterns that aren't really something you'd see in nature.
Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.
Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.
So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.
Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.
Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down
By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.
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 light purple and white represents Mexican culture and food? It's the whitest thing they could do without making the sign all white. Same thing with Target. Now some of the logos are white on white!
https://www.designyourway.net/blog/target-logo/
It's odd that in this era where we are supposed to be embracing diversity and difference that we are homogenizing our logos to white or gray goo.
I think the duller colors we see nowadays has something to do with the ongoing minimalism trend. Minimalism is seen as professional-looking. Unfortunately, now we have the problem that brands struggle to differentiate themselves because any overly creative design risks coming across as 'unprofessional'. The balance of 'appearing unique' and 'appearing professional' has shifted towards the latter.
In a broader sense, it reflects society's shift towards increased centralization and conformity and an intolerance towards outliers.
Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.
I hate this with passion with cars - sea of grey in western Europe. Heck, both of our cars are grey - we always buy used ones and there was simply no other option that wasn't 10k more expensive for params we wanted and were willing to pay. It looks bland, boring, unimaginative. One of top reasons why buy new - one can actually choose something nicer.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over India and boy do they use crazy intense colors all over and everywhere including clothing - orange, purple, pink, very bright, both men and women. A very, very nice visual experience one doesn't get used to. Then coming back to western civilization where literally everybody dresses in black or dark grey during winter. Its just sad view, like winter with low amount of sunlight isn't depressing enough, no lets add some more monotonous colors.
I disagree. The 60s through the 80s had a wide color palette with extremely good design. Early 1900s too. Heck even the Greek statues were extremely colorful.
However, if everyone followed that same "modern taste," everything would look alike. Just as the technicolor era had its appeal, so do bold color palettes.
The best approach depends on the desired effect and overall design.
You've got me imagining a bright green room filled with silver appliances and white furniture.
But nothing is colorful. Every damn thing is a shade of gray. It's like "50 shade of gray" fans started doing UIs.
Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.
The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/01/pink-blue/
> It's bad design
Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.
I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
This is a trend, not an opinion.
What a load of crap. Where do you live, in a cave? have you ever been in a jungle perhaps? what about birds with colorful feathers? you want to wash out those colors too? jesus, nature dictates and nature is full of vivid colors. so your argument goes down the drain.
there is no such thing as modern taste. there are trends dictated by a handful of psychotic gatekeepers who got hooked on their own farts.
old movies had the absolute best coloring. compare those movies to the ones seen now and you are on the verge of retching. these superficial, devoid of human value superprocessed heaps of shit they try to force feed to people, just plain unwatchable. not just the story lacks, it has zero message, nothing to chew on, just some brainwashing action scenes. that's good for the plebs they say while squeezing people for money.
absolutely reprehensible, that a handful of gatekeepers put people into these literal psycho gardens that is devoid of anything resembling human. what's missing is the human part. the humanity is slowly missing from everything.
But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.
do not hide behind some weeny invisible bs wall you erected
That's a personal attack.
Please review the HN guidelines.
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still.
That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this year and gone the next, so if you have one of those no-longer-available colours it sticks out like a sore thumb as looking old. Which is what I believe the consumer truly fears – owning a car that looks old and dated.
The blacks and whites have remained consistently available, so it is far less risky.
From a buyer's perspective there's still a choice of color if you have no allegiance to brand, but the monochromatic tribalism of each brand (and their loyalists) is strangely fascinating.
Case in point. The last of the ACGO tractors in orange now look old and dated even though the otherwise _identical_[1] Massey Ferguson tractors from the same era still look relatively modern.
[1] Technically they had different engines, but that isn't visible anyway.
1. Flat vertical panels are a no-no. Adding creases increases buckling resistance.
2. That's a hugely important area for cabin noise because the side mirrors cause turbulence and the vehicle body needs a channel to constrain the turbulent flow and flex as little as possible near the door seals.
3. The skin needs to expand outwards from the line of the pillars to fit the window mechanisms, the handles/locks, and the side impact protection without intruding into the cabin space.
4. It makes the car look more sporty and interesting. The technical term for the crease itself is "character line", and it's the main reason why the Corolla has one. It's visual reinforcement for the modern standard combo of low hoods-high trunks that's considered attractive styling.
5. The greenhouse (cabin) narrows towards the top for rollover safety and aerodynamic reasons (a.k.a tumblehome), and this needs to blend with the rest of the body in a visually appealing way. The cybertruck is a good example of how unusual it can look if this is just a straight line on the body. Here's a comparison between the current design and an ai-generated "rounded" design [2] [3].
[1] https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/CP/44005...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/files/67a2770e2906d20008bad29f/1-...
[3] https://static0.carbuzzimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploa...
Once you see it you can't unsee it and it starts to look very ugly very fast.
This. If you look at the cars, pretty much the only "stock" bright color is red. I used to drive a grass green car (vinyl wrap), and it stood out everywhere.
I wish car makers offered more color options by default.
Even Mazda doesn't offer them for all their vehicles.
Still, I think we’re seeing a LOT more color. From the cool khaki blue Subaru color that was so popular, to the M2 BMW in baby blue, to the Audi e-tron in purple, to the corvettes and mustangs that I rarely see in monochromatic colors.
Shudders. A lot of shows were utterly unwatchable for me.
(Now they're just unwatchable because of the mumbling/whispering and the colour palettes tweaked to the extent nothing has any contrast left.)
Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by.
Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed or something. Recall that the 90s were still pretty colorful in regards to clothing here in the US. And then just a couple of years later people here were all starting to wear those greys, charcoals and black.
Offtopic, but did you look into painting options? It's often cheaper to buy a better car and just repaint it. My friend have a lime car (with some original color saved for the accents) because they did that. You mentioned the colour specifically and I remembered that it wasn't that pricey
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
Maybe we should be more blissful, not sure what leads to bliss....
Apple really drops the ball on colors in 99% of their products. You have the iMac and.... oh wait, that's it. There are no real colors on the pro phones and even the non-pro phones looks like something that got 1 of 10 coats of color. And then the MBPs have a handful of shades of gray, I would totally buy a green or blue MBP if there was one.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
It's always easy to make an outfit that goes together and makes a good impression. Men's Japanese and European fashion brands work well with this choice. I see this on the streets in Paris or Amsterdam fairly commonly, but rarely in the US.
I've found that it's very disarming and engaging; even though I'm over 6'3" and a big guy with a tight hair cut, I'm almost never perceived as a threat. I'm a natural introvert, but it seems to make approachability easier. Since having a kid, and him growing into a toddler, I think it helps there too. It's just more fun. Strong recommend.
I can't speak to Amsterdam, but it's commonly said that the way you know Americans in Paris is that they're wearing bright colors. The navy blue suit is almost a uniform for professional Parisian men.
When computers were beige, they went all in on color to stand out. When everything started being more colorful, they moved to white and then grey/silver. Now that everything is grey/silver, they're moving to gold/rose.
Only the living room has any colors. Bedroom and bathroom are as boring as can be, so that you do your shit, don't get distracted, and get back to the living room.
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and 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.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
I would see God's as hedonistic but not greeks. Honestly, my bias is that they were very boring amd sort of artificial.
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
This is biased data: when cars that are not white or black cost 1000 of euros more from the factory, and custom non-preselected colors even more, then people tend to but the cheap colors. Especially when they are corporate lease cars and the corporation doesn’t care about the color.
If car companies want more color, do not charge for it.
- Brown is an extremely warm color, and sucks up all of the ugly blues from unnatural light sources
- Brown pairs well with all sorts of shades and colors, just like the millennial gray and white tones
- Brown can come in all sorts of shades and vibrancies, but is not as stimulating as other colors
- Brown hides dirt, scuffs, and stains extremely well
Humans have spent most of our history being very familiar with the color brown in our natural world. I moved from a modern home (everything in white and grays) and into a 1920s brown home with brown-beige walls and all of its original brown wood accents and fixtures. And then I stuffed it with brown furniture. Not only is it beautiful and cozy, I swear that this was the first year I didn't suffer from seasonal affective disorder in a long time.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone_448_C
[2]: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/ddB3zq/designekspertene-elsker-d...
[3]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/fhi_-ny-design-pa-roykpakker-og-...
Another part that affects me is being colorblind. When I was in elementary school I was mocked for wearing one blue sock and one purple sock, something that I was unaware that I was doing. I began wearing less color because at least I could be confident that I wasn't mismatching my clothes. But then in high school I was mocked for always wearing greyscale clothes because "what are you, colorblind or something?"
(As long as it's not too outlandish of a sock combo, ha)
A lot of Hollywood productions these days are sequels, re-runs, and endless variations of successful movies. Down to copying stylistic elements, color grading, etc.
I love Tim Burton and Wes Anderson as directors. Both use vibrant, saturated colors and have a very recognizable style. Tim Burton uses lush, saturated colors to portray suburbs (many of his movies feature lush green lawns white picket fences, etc.).
And Wes Anderson has his famous style of exactly centered subjects,using a lot of surrealist visuals, and elaborate sets and models. I loved the little Roald Dahl thing he did on Netflix two years ago or so (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) where all of this was on display. If you haven't seen that, worth a watch.
I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.
You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
It is definitely not like that here - everything from our flag down is full of color.
* Historical objects in museums are likely more colorful because we cared to preserve the most visually striking objects. Classic survivorship bias.
* Music has less dynamic range than in early recordings because producers were competing to be the loudest sounding song on the radio (see "loudness wars"). Those wars are actually over now and dynamic range has been increasing for about a decade.
* There is a whole lot going on behind trends in cinematographer color grading if you look into that world. But in the example here, I think it's largely that audiences expected "muted brown" as the color grade to send a "period film" signal. Witness also how every medieval or fantasy movie feels compelled to have all of the castle walls bare gray rock when they were in fact plastered and brightly colored. Likewise Roman architecture being alabaster white. Audiences wouldn't believe a Roman movie with painted statues or a fantasy film with colorful castle walls.
* Cars have muted colors because consumers moved towards a model where they sell cars every few years. When purchasing a car, they choose neutral colors to maximize resale value. Also, I think cars are simply much less a part of someone's social identity and status symbol and more of a utilitarian object than they they used to be. (Witness that when people buy expensive sports cars, those are more likely to be brightly colored.)
* Interior design trends come and go, but I think one of the drivers of gray walls was that it became a popular style for Airbnb rentals to avoid turning off potential renters. That led it to become associated with internationalism and modernity, and from there it sort of took off. Also, an increasing number of people are renting and are simply unable to paint their walls more interesting colors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.
To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:
> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).
whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:
> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.
The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?
[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
I'm thinking of spending another 1 or 2 $K to have it painted. The economy of the purchase is diminished by that, but hey, I have to l.ook at it everyday, and it's boring (and hard to find in parking lots, as you mention)...
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
I might resell my house or my car but my PC is a like looking into a rainbow supernova. My clothes have patterns and prints that weren't even technically possible 100 years ago. I can go buy paint for my walls at any hardware store that would cost a fortune during the renaissance. I can print any artwork I want at home at amazing quality or pay a little more for an even better pro print. I've got a number of screens in my house that can reproduce more colors than I can differentiate.
The world is more colorful than ever, I don't think we have to point to the tired car examples or temporary trends in home decoration or filmmaking and claim something's missing.
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
Cars: Searching online I found this chart: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev... - and ... it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time. A paragraph here - https://www.colorwithleo.com/why-isnt-green-a-popular-car-co... - provides something insightful:
"Historical Perceptions of Green Cars
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
Because buying anything not in the standard white/black/corporate gray is easily an extra thousand euros on top of the car price. Red is still sometimes offered as standard color.
Just checked. I drive a Mazda CX-30. In Sweden literally anything that is not white is 500 to 1000 euro extra: https://www.mazda.se/bygg-din-mazda/MAZDA%20CX-30/5WGN/# skip to Exteriörlack (exterior color).
This is driven in part by a shift towards mobile screens and the compression in visual space. Even on the desktop the favicon has an influence with this deconstruction.
There are other factors with car colour:
- Visibility: white and yellow are more visible and get a premium discount.
- Fleet ownership: which mostly means white.
The amount of grey manufactured at the moment is interesting as they attract a higher premium because they are basically the same colour as the road. Black is also deemed less visible.
Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.
American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.
And there was already a very similar article last year: https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color
I will take latest matrix. The movie was awful, of course, but I was in awe of its bright, vivid, wonderful color work. If only plot was better.
Biologically, color drives behavior. Exposure to the same color palette over time develops tolerance, so *different* colors might be perceived as more attractive.
I believe each individual is unique in their color perception and emotional response, but there's obviously a shared social aspect of it too.
That said, it's interesting to see the young generation's artistic preferences, which reminds me of 90's for some reason :)
Go back and look at 80s, 90s movies and compare to 2024 movies and the 2024 movies have way more color. Except a few examples here and there that are stylized or graded that way intentionally, but those are few and far between in my experience.
Like go look at mainstream stuff like marvel movies. Those are all way more colorful than basically any movie from the 70s-2000.
- Renault Clio is very popular in metallic orange
- Renault 5 e-tech in bright yellow and green
- MG in aqua/azure blue
- Peugeot 208 in dark yellow and blue and dark red
I prefer things with low color contrast in general, just to leave some color space for important things. Maybe this preference stems from the time I tweak color themes in IDEs.
In contrast, I also found more and more photography pieces which show vibrant colors and high color contrasts.
(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)
All I can say is that if it is not baroque, do not fix it.
China is a concrete jungle anywhere you have a mass of cameras.
That about sums it up. Not whatever US-based fashion trend that you hate this week.
NVM, I think that's a Fiat, not Austin.
Basically had culture shock driving down a wide north american road.
It's not just the colors. It's the emptiness.
The clearance of everything in north america is insane. It's just so boring.
For the percent of colors in photos, i m not sure. Older technologies oversaturated colors and probably underrepresented greys (or turned them to red/green) , but maybe newer photo technologies allowed more blues and greys.
The cinema thing is real and very annoying to the point where i have to oversaturate all my screens in order to stop seeing actors' faces as corpses.
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
In this class of games, it's common for a game to be printed, possibly have several printings, and then go out of print. For particularly sticky games, they may come back with a reprint or redesign years later. And I've noticed going back decades that the redesign almost always replaces bold, functional, high-contrast designs for low-contrast, "realistic", "pretty' designs. Examples:
- Brass: original [1] vs redesign [2]
- Titan: original [3] vs redesign [4]
- Saint Petersburg: original [5] vs redesign [6]
I don't know why this is but part of it comes down to people wanting to add "value" by changing things rather than just reprinting them. But why go "realistic"? I think there's a pervasive idea in this space that "realism" is good. So that's a trend.
Cars go beyond color. Cars become a white or other neutral color because it's the least potentially "offensive". Car makers want the largest possible market. Plus companies like Hertz want this kind of car. But look at cars from the 1950s through 1980s and on top of color you have a lot of cosmetic design choices that we don't have now because they're less aerodynamic but, more importantly, cheaper.
In a way, the car ceased to become an object of expression. Instead for many people it's just pure utility. So the designs became utilitarian. You may disagree because people are very opinionated on what cars they prefer but I think that just expresses brand preferences not aesthetic choices.
Chain restaurants also exhibit this trend. Compare McDonald's from the 1980s vs now. A lot of fast food restaurants are now much harder to distinguish.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4265429/brass-lancashire
[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1278376/brass-lancashire
Either way, I'd never even consider buying 1 (the redesign?), it's nearly impossible to "read" that board, while 2 (the original?) looks immediately inviting, without being at-all ugly.
https://culture.ghost.io/cultural-stasis-produces-fewer-chee...
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
I for one don't like that car insurance companies do this, but this very likely is a huge reason why fewer people buy vehicles with colour beyond Grey/etc.
The exception (maybe the source of the myth) is that cars with custom or exotic colors will cost more if you opt for comprehensive coverage.
When I renew my insurance, on the website it shows 'grey'. They know what colour your car is.
https://www.progressive.com/answers/red-car-myths/ https://www.allstate.com/resources/car-insurance/do-red-cars...
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."
I guess these people weren't alive in the 1960s 8-/ The psychedelic era had color everywhere.
Not only color in design, but in people's general appearance. When I look through my highschool yearbook (1977), I'm shocked (shocked I tell you) at how _different_ everyone looked, not from now, but from each otther, then. I'm not just talking about stoners vs jocks, everyone had an individual look based around their overall physical characteristics.
Now, it's mostly Justin Beeber nazi-haircuts, and the ubiquitous "please run me over in the crosswalk" black clothing fashion statement.
In general, people aren't attempting to have an autonomous indivduality, instead everyone (wing-nut and woke-nut alike) are striving to value posture in their chosen identity "community".
How boring...
> a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.
https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
Nah it's just fashion and materials. Even if you just look at apples product line, you can see they went from colorful plastic to monochrome metal and glass to how reintroducing colors to several of their product lines.
People want so badly for there to be underlying, global conspiracy that they see it everywhere.
It's hard to decide how much of the author's position is born from ignorance versus how much of it is born from disingenuousness.
Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.
In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
Many years back I used to practice social skills and pickup. I realised quite quickly while learning how to socialise that colour is one of the more important ways to alter how others perceive you prior to knowing you.
Specifically, greys and blacks were generally a bad choice and tended to signal low-confidence or a lack of character. There is an exception here for formal wear, but generic fashion choices like a black tshirt, grey shorts and black shoes will make you look devoid of personality. Always try to wear some colour if dressing casually and if you want to appear more friendly soft blues, greens and pinks I think are some of the most inviting colours.
Hot pink was one of my favourite colours to cautiously add when socialising as a guy in a casual setting because it can be quite an interesting colour choice. It's far less aggressive than a strong red, but almost equally as striking. And its purpose is more confusing (and therefore interesting) than other colours since it could both be a sign of a confident heterosexual guy, or an outwardly gay guy. For this reason I've found hot pink is a good colour to add if meeting girls in a casual setting because it can be initially sexually neutralising while also an indicator of confidence (being too sexually forward is generally a bad strategy).
However, in a formal settings whites and blacks are generally what you'll want to go with. Beige colours can also work, but might make you look a bit old fashioned today. I thought the reaction Jordan Peterson got when he starting wearing very colourful and striking suits was interesting because it confirmed a lot of my speculation around how people view colour in formal wear. It's very, very difficult to balance class with colour. If you want to appear classy it's almost required that you stick with whites and blacks.
I personally suspect the world is losing colour because of the above two points – we associate class with neutral colours (blacks and whites generally) and strong colours can impose strong emotional responses which we might want to avoid (generally speaking anyway).
My guess is that if you saw a brightly coloured home or car you will have a sense that the person who owns that thing has a lack of class and a strong colour might even suggest something negative or unintended about the owner. For this reason you might be tempted to just stick with something neutral to avoid this. This would be especially true for colourful items of low value because creating a strong emotional reaction around an item of little value it's probably going be perceived as overwhelmingly negative. Hence why some teen driving fast in a bright red but inexpensive car can be aggravating, while someone else driving fast in a bright red Ferrari while not especially classy is still likely to be far less negatively perceived.
And beyond the class aspect, I'd suspect the lack of colour we see today is a reflection of our lower self-confidence both as individuals and culturally. I suspect people increasingly don't want to stand out or make an impression in public, and culturally in the West we're less confident and perhaps don't believe our public buildings deserve to be as striking or grand as they were in the past.
I don't really know why blacks and whites suggest class either. I suspect that's a cultural thing that could change, but perhaps that would first require us to be confident enough to make an emotional impression. Perhaps too much confidence is viewed as unclassy today, while being timid and softly spoken is generally seen more positively. Either way, even if you believe the world should be more colourful, I wouldn't suggest leading the way on that in your own life – at least not if you care about how others will perceive you.
If you feel so, it is a massive red flag that your brain is in a depressive state.
Source: fixed my mental demons and now the world is suddenly full of color and life, as if I was a child again