Color is critical to any successful design project – yet nailing the ideal color palette for a project is notoriously tough. Beyond the Color Chart, an online course with Jude Stewart, will teach you to wield color more intelligently in your graphic design practice. Learn more and register.
Square in beige 1 by glasseyes view on Flickr: http://bit.ly/1BVQCPn
“Beige is the color of evil,” begins Andrea Codrington’s 2001 essay for the “Colors” column in Cabinet Magazine. She’s quoting blogger Aaron Priven, who feels sufficiently exercised against the color beige that he’s written a vehement – and much-linked-to post – on the subject. “The most evil color has to appear benign.”
As further evidence of the color’s malign side, Codrington cites military khaki, also known as “drab.” British Indian Army troops began dyeing their white uniforms with tea and curry in the mid-nineteenth century—neutralizing themselves into the beige-colored landscape while (presumably) easing the military’s stiff laundry bills. What could be more sinister than the color cloaking a colonial sniper, dissolving him neatly into the landscape? (I wrote a visual history of camouflage for The Believer, starting here.)
Current Events Brief 16 by Hector Alejandro on Flickr: http://bit.ly/1z1UDUA
Even more pointedly, Codrington conjures up Nazi war criminal (and subject of Hannah Arendt’s classic book Eichmann in Jerusalem: clad in beige uniform, dryly factual, blandly bureaucratic, a logorrheic river of beige spilling from his lips. She also recalls the Great Depression’s plaintive nickname, the “Taupe Age” – grinding poverty as gunny-sack-colored.
Even UrbanDictionary.com backs up the conundrum that is beige. Definition 2 of “beige” refers to “a description of a county / suburb / neighborhood / restaurant, etc. that has no personality.” Fair enough, except definition 1 says “beige” can mean “super-exciting, not run-of-the-mill”. (Example: “How was the party?” “It was beige, mate, beige.”) Which is it?
Bean Dune Okay? by JD Hancock on Flickr: http://bit.ly/1ASGIAT
Similarly, my book ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color contains an entry of astronomers tussling over the average color of the universe. While the first calculation yielded a brilliant turquoise, later corrections amended this view: the universe on average is beige, or more precisely “Cosmic Latte” as the astronomers dubbed it. Why is that such a letdown?
Modernity, it seems, hates all liars, and the over-spreading message conveyed by beige embodies a certain violence to its ideals. Conformity. Unobtrusiveness. Mass production. Plainspokenness, or so the color too overtly promised. What lies behind the nubbly curtain of beige?
Beige personal care products. Creation and branding by Josep Puy, via Behance.net: https://www.behance.net/gallery/18202685/BEIGE
Fourteen years since Codrington’s essay, beige’s polarizing effects have softened. Nowadays, while beige-haters still stalk the landscape, I’d argue that beige-hating has officially jumped the shark. Why keep tiring yourself, punching at a color that so rarely punches back? (Sidebar: beige-hating can still be damn funny. Witness the character Tom’s remarks on Parks and Recreation: “Ben, stop! This is like listening to a Ted Talk by the color beige!”)
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Today beige conveys a slightly different range of ideas: naturalness and a welcome return of texture; universality of human experience across race and culture; a sense of respite in a visually hectic landscape; even nostalgia and the patina of age. The world according to Instagram is now beige-tinted.
For a cool $3,499, you can buy a limited-edition MacBook Air in Retro beige. Via Brand New: http://bit.ly/1A94uTL
Pine-resin wood, raw cork, unbleached canvas, pristine cardboard: indeed, all the raw materials of the creative class are colored beige. They beg completion with color, ideas, cuts, nuance, vivacity. Beige is inviting. Even when pixelated, its bland depths can reveal infinite nuances of shadow, line and detail that more vivid shades would obscure. Consider my new favorite F
lickr photo-group, the Pavement Patterns Museum. The collection is awash in chiaroscuro, grittiness, everything a photographer hankers after – and it’s nearly exclusively beige.
Pavement Patterns Museum on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/groups/pavementpatterns/
Attention: Craft, a fall 2014 exhibit about experimental craft in Stockholm. Via Under Consideration: http://bit.ly/1Ca6Y6Z
Beige is less a color externally applied and more a natural emanation. Raw cardboard or thin wood can convey the right touch of neutrality that makes bolder colors pop: nature and artifice happily comingled. Consider Restaurant Spirit, a vegetarian restaurant in Rotterdam, who got their the restaurant interior, concept and branding re-imagined by – you guessed it – Studio Beige of the same city.
Restaurant Spirit, a vegetarian restaurant in Rotterdam, with concept and branding by Studio Beige. Via Behance: http://on.be.net/YQF5Od
Another Studio Beige project I like: Goliath Sportswear’s re-branding. The catalog’s nubbled cardboard cover is haptic at its most glorious, and the the footwear photographed within exists in the past (in sepia) and boldly punched-up for the future in jewel tones. Beige, baby: it’s the chromatic mike-drop of a classic.
Goliath Sportswear re-branding by Studio Beige, via Behance: http://on.be.net/1yc4ZQA
Goliath Sportswear re-branding by Studio Beige, via Behance: http://on.be.net/1yc4ZQA
As a modern color, beige is discreet, sly, knowing: a color to watch closely but also learn volumes from. Minimalist artist Robert Ryman, whose perhaps best known for his all-white paintings, says of that color: “White has a tendency to make things visible. With white you can see more of a nuance; you can see more.” You can easily pay the same comment – or compliment? – to beige.
Cover the basics with an exploration of the color wheel, hue, saturation, value, and more. Once you’ve established the basic color fundamentals, understand the practical application of color with a discussion on how to alter hues, paint with color, target themes, create palettes, use digital color, and accurately output your colorful creations to print.