one of the most avid color fans alive. Much of this post’s research
originated with him. (Tweet me @joodstew if you have an idea for next month’s roundup.)
Forget Le Corbusier’s brutally misnamed Radiant City. Architect and color specialist Joseph Urban’s Rainbow City concept (in the left column) for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair presents a breathtaking alternative vision that depicts a gorgeous, color-drenched cityscape made fleetingly real by the American Asphalt Paint Company. The project covered 10.5 million square feet of Chicago with 28 custom colors and employed 350 workers for the task over six months. A tremendous design idea, writ very large. [via Recto Verso Blog]
Praça Cantão Favela Painting project, via Wooster Collective
Large-scale architectural rainbows are out of control! The City of New York has commissioned artist Molly Dilworth to paint brightly colored murals on Times Square rooftops and pedestrian walkways of Times Square – both as urban art and as a clever means of reducing heat pollution from sticky-black asphalt. Earlier this month, Berlin’s Rosenthaler Platz was zigzagged with a living rainbow of paint that mimicked traffic patterns. Most recently, the Favela Painting project has subsumed another slum in a vividly fresh paintjob. Since 2006, Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas en Dre Urhahn have spearheaded this community-driven art project, which is similar in spirit to Dulux Paints’ Let’s Colour project. [via Wooster Collective]
Color preferences table used in Palmer and Schloss’ color preferences study, via Neurotopia
This one zipped around the Internet in a hurry, so perhaps you’ve already seen the XKCD color survey? But while we’re on the topic, two cognitive scientists actually did take a crack at developing what they
call an “ecological valence theory” of color preference, which claims that humans prefer certain colors because they’re ecologically healthy
(crystal-blue water, healthy green plants) and avoid ecologically
unhealthy colors (brown for feces or things rotting). It’s a
plausible-sounding theory until you’ve spent a full 30 seconds listing
many lovely, life-affirming, chocolatey-brown things and – while you’re
at it – shot through the theory almost effortlessly with many other
counterexamples. If you wonder how Actual Scientists might react to XKCD’s color-findings – an informal, if heftily large sampling of color-fans and their preferences – here’s your answer. Plenty of neuroscientists and related compadres have explored why girls like pink and boys blue, including this study reported in Time involving Chinese and British subjects. It’s a worthy subject, but highly vulnerable to pseudoscientific claims. Beware.
What Color are Most iPhone and iPad Apps?
If you’re plumping for hard color-preference facts, here are some inarguable ones: I Love Charts’ analysis of which colors dominate iPhone and iPad apps. Blue, we heart you! (And black, although mixing the two makes for an overly-bruisy effect.)
Color-preferences can and will be manipulated – ask any designer or marketer worth her salt. Even the TED geniuses agree – witness this recent talk by bioinformatics expert Sebastian Wernicke about building the perfect TED talk. Fast-forward the video to 3:55 to find the key to a perfectly optimized color scheme. (Hint: to maximally fascinate your TED audience, go for cornflower blue; to lean more towards ingenious, try forest-green.)
Rainbow in Your Hand flipbook by Utrecht
THE MADMAN KNOWS FOR SURE.
Anton Wilson [via butdoesitfloat]
The perennial bestselling Color Index by Jim Krause is even better! Color Index, Revised Edition provides more than1,100 color combinations and formulas that are proven to help.
Beware of people who criticize science and don’t actually read the article describing it. (did you only read neurotopia’s blog?)
From Palmer & Schloss (2010), “[the EVT's] main deficiencies
are underpredicting the aversion to dark orange (possibly because chocolate and coffee are often judged as quite appealing) and underpredicting the positive preference for dark red (possibly because blood is usually judged as unappealing).
They state that this is an issue with their theory. However, it is clear from their analysis (if you had read it) that it is by far the best explanation of basic color preferences. Science is hard and so there are issues with their theory, but it is almost slander to call their methodology bad.
=joe
Beware of people who criticize science and don’t actually read the article describing it. (did you only read neurotopia’s blog?)
From Palmer & Schloss (2010), “[the EVT's] main deficiencies
are underpredicting the aversion to dark orange (possibly because chocolate and coffee are often judged as quite appealing) and underpredicting the positive preference for dark red (possibly because blood is usually judged as unappealing).
They state that this is an issue with their theory. However, it is clear from their analysis (if you had read it) that it is by far the best explanation of basic color preferences. Science is hard and so there are issues with their theory, but it is almost slander to call their methodology bad.
=joe
Beware of people who criticize science and don’t actually read the article describing it. (did you only read neurotopia’s blog?)
From Palmer & Schloss (2010), “[the EVT's] main deficiencies
are underpredicting the aversion to dark orange (possibly because chocolate and coffee are often judged as quite appealing) and underpredicting the positive preference for dark red (possibly because blood is usually judged as unappealing).
They state that this is an issue with their theory. However, it is clear from their analysis (if you had read it) that it is by far the best explanation of basic color preferences. Science is hard and so there are issues with their theory, but it is almost slander to call their methodology bad.
=joe