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Why Pencils Are Yellow (2017)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notatoad 8y agoarticle appears to be down, pastebin of google cache: https://pastebin.com/W7ZXM6Vy https://pastebin.com/W7ZXM6Vy
- basch 8y agoeasier to read -- https://telegra.ph/The-Little-Known-Reason-Pencils-Are-Yellow-10-31 https://telegra.ph/The-Little-Known-Reason-Pencils-Are-Yello...
- Insanity 8y agoI associate it with these actually: https://hobbyklei.nl/1816-large_default/bic-potlood-gilbert-blister-van-2-stuks.jpg https://hobbyklei.nl/1816-large_default/bic-potlood-gilbert-... Maybe a Belgian / Netherlands thing? Or perhaps just me :)
- ThePadawan 8y agoWe did have yellow pens in Germany, but thinking back on it, the forest green of Faber-Castell [0] was the color I would associate with pencils the most. [0] https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilCastell9000JumboHB/119300 https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilCastell...
- HarryHirsch 8y agoAlso blue. Staedler was blue, with a black top.
- eterm 8y agoOur school Staedler HB pencils were all yellow and black such as these: https://www.glsed.co.uk/product/stationery/pencils/blacklead/staedtler-hb-graphite-noris-pencils-pack-of-72/g290387 https://www.glsed.co.uk/product/stationery/pencils/blacklead... The occassional ones were red and black, I think those were more likely to be 'B' or '2B' ones, but it's been longer than I can remeber since I used such a pencil.
- sebazzz 8y agoThe default Bruynzeel pencils often used in schools in the Netherlands were yellow. But that may just be _my_ bubble.
- lucb1e 8y agoDutch/limburg here, very rare to see those. I think mine were usually green (a brighter shade than the ones linked in a sibling thread), but not exclusively. We also had uncoloured and black for example.
- Symbiote 8y agoAlmost all the pencils in my childhood were red. The manufacturer was Berol. Of course, my schools didn't necessarily buy the highest quality pencils for the children, and they probably all came from the same supplier. The high-quality ones, which a relative who was a draughtsman used, were dark green [1] [1] https://www.ebay.ie/itm/12-x-Berol-Venus-H-Fine-Quality-Writing-Drawing-Pencils-Vintage-White-Tip/123380819314 https://www.ebay.ie/itm/12-x-Berol-Venus-H-Fine-Quality-Writ...
- b5 8y agoAcross the water in Scotland, the most common pencils in school were black and yellow striped -- the Staedtler Noris, back then made in Wales and stamped "Made in Great Britain". These were the ones the school provided and also the ones parents bought. Still a great pencil today, but no longer made in the UK. High-quality ones, used by a couple of artists and a draughtsman my parents knew, were blue: Staedtler Mars Lumographs, again made then in the UK, but now only made in Germany. Still an even better pencil than the Noris. I remember Berol "Handwriting" pens, red with a white nib that produced blue ink, but never liked them or used them much. Berol had colouring pencils sewn up when I was in school.
- mprev 8y agoBerol were kind of the British Sharpie, in some respects. Not exactly the same product but similarly ubiquitous. They were made in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, I think.
- lb1lf 8y agoAcross yet another pond, in Norway, my childhood school pencils were Norises in primary whereas in secondary we got Lumographs. I still can vividly recall the sense of awe whenever I entered the storage room in which the school kept all consumables - box upon box of pencils, erasers, rulers, notebooks... Somewhat of a writing fetishist to this day - I have a box of Lumographs in the office for field notes, whereas meeting notes and such are mostly done with a fountain pen.
- romwell 8y ago
- airstrike 8y agoIn my mind, Faber-Castell will forever be the ultimate pencil. I think yellow pencils are a staple of American culture but in my mind pencils are green... http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilCastell9000Perfectpencilsparepencil/119038 http://www.fabercastell.com/products/pencils/GraphitepencilC...
- wccrawford 8y agoI must say, I did always think those pencils were higher quality than the ones I got. But I didn't get just yellow ones. I had many different colors and patterns. I do instinctively recognize yellow as "the color of pencils" but it's from so many cartoon graphics of them, not because they were all that color.
- keerthiko 8y agoStaedller, the most stable graphite lead pencil brand across Asia (not colored pencils) were black and yellow striped hexagonal, and of wonderful quality (iirc, better than Faber Castell for art pencils).
- cyphar 8y agoIn Australia and New Zealand, Staedtler are hexagonal but red and black. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg
- cannam 8y agoI suppose it's quite easy to monopolise the visual imagination of one child. I picture pencils as black, because someone once gave me a nice mixed tin of Caran d'Ache pencils which were all matte black, and I used them endlessly to do drawings of 16x16 sprites and 8x8 fonts on graph paper.
- jacobush 8y agoMSX? Spectravideo? Which other system used 16x16 sprites? :-)
- 8y ago
- dv_dt 8y agoAt the time, many yellow paints had lead in them. I wonder of that was the true then... makes me think about chewed-upon pencils.
- rdtsc 8y agoOr cadmium is also a yellow pigment. I do remember chewing on my pencils. Maybe I should get a lead blood test. Or maybe I shouldn't cause it's too late anyway...
- c0nfused 8y agoIt may be tough to detect vs the background noise in the United States these days, https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1DE1H2 https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...
- viburnum 8y agoBorrowdale is only seven miles from Derwent. Were there other English pencil makers in the area?
- t3ra 8y agoExplains my confusion with early internet "cliparts" and icons being always in yellow. I am sure most non westerns might be equally confused. Pencil meant black and red for us in India - Natraj FTW
- fnordprefect 8y agoIt's not even Western, from my experience it's just the US. In Australia, I don't think I'd ever seen a yellow pencil, other than one that came in a set of coloured pencils for art. I hadn't realised it was the norm in the US until relatively recently. We have these, just for example: https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfaber1221HB/112500 https://www.faber-castell.com/products/GraphitepencilGoldfab... https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories/pencils/tradition-110-pencil/ https://www.staedtler.com.au/en/products/pencils-accessories...
- gdrulia 8y agoDefinitely not just US. I'm from Lithuania and these were the pencils we all used [0]. That was around 1992 and later, so could have been a relic from Soviets. Only in later years green ones appeared and yellow with black stripes. [0] - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-background-51944149.jpg https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/lead-pencil-isolated-white-b...
- Multicomp 8y agoI spent a year in the baltics, got homeschooled while there. The pencils were a tealish green and tasted much worse than your garden variety Dixon, but wrote much better. It was probably an H grade rather than HB. Pencils in the US stores often come out smudgy to me ever since then...
- int_19h 8y agoI distinctly recall yellow pencils in the USSR. Not that it was the only color, but it was definitely a popular one. Looking it up, apparently this has something to do with pencils being manufactured in early (1920s) USSR by an American entrepreneur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armand_Hammer#Career https://i.imgur.com/vpObXqU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/vpObXqU.jpg Eventually the Soviet government bought the entire operation from him, and thenceforth it became this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%88%D1%83%D1%89%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B9_%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8_%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BA%D0%BE_%D0%B8_%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%82%D0%B8 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE... And they probably just continued to use yellow, because why not?
- jimjimjim 8y agoRed and Black stripes. I don't think i've ever held a yellow pencil.
- tsumnia 8y ago"Hardtmuth settled on yellow to communicate the graphite’s geographical origins", China because "yellow had long been tied to royalty." Please stop clickbait.
- narag 8y agoWithout the clickbait title, you might have missed the beautiful pop-up that obscures the entire window requesting a subscription. Nowadays, every page seems to have one of those or the cookie disclaimer. Advertisers and idiotic laws are close to reaching their goal of definitely ruining web experience.
- Johnny555 8y agoI think this needs more detail: In China, yellow had long been tied to royalty... Eventually, the shade came to represent happiness, glory, and wisdom. Was this true outside of China too? Did buyers in the western world really associate the color with Chinese Royalty? Or did they just like the bright color?
- macintux 8y agoDisclaimer: pure speculation follows. Ignorance abounds. In that era, I believe there was an obsessive interest in all things "Oriental". China and Japan were both still very mysterious, with Japan having been forced to open up in the 2nd half of the 19th century, and China similarly unwillingly thrust onto the world stage by the Opium Wars in the same timeframe. So, it wouldn't surprise me that a company would be able to leverage the interest in China via marketing. Maybe people didn't know of the association with yellow before the marketing, but I'd bet they did after.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sarahdavid130 8y agohttps://kotakupcgames.blogspot.com/2018/10/we-happy-few-free-download.html https://kotakupcgames.blogspot.com/2018/10/we-happy-few-free...
- logfromblammo 8y agoMy pencils have been plastic and steel as far back as I can remember, with 0.5 mm HB rods in the good ones, and 0.7mm HB in the disposables. During some tests, some teachers just couldn't believe that HB and #2 were the same thing, so that's about the only time I wrote with painted wood.
- technofiend 8y agoFark yeah. I'd give real money to get my 9th grade book bag back! HP 11C scientific calculator, drafting supplies including a bunch of mechanical pencils and fancy erasers, and a copy of the HHGTTG. Pure nostalgia right there.
- macintux 8y agoA few years back HP manufactured a few new HP-15C calculators as a limited edition. I was lucky enough to hear about it early and buy one. I see they're now on Amazon for crazy high prices, so I assume they're no longer in production.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- biztos 8y agoI remember all the pencils being yellow in school (in California), some at home being red and maybe also some blue ones, and then in Germany of course a lot of green. These days the general-purpose pencils I occasionally use are no "color" at all: https://www.leadfast.org/blog/2017/8/11/generals-cedar-pointe-pencil-review https://www.leadfast.org/blog/2017/8/11/generals-cedar-point...
- vanous 8y agoYes, yellow were the pencils of my childhood. But finally I learned what Koh-i-noor stands for, never bothered to Czech. Pun intended :) CZ citizen here.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- babak_ap 8y agoThe article doesn't mention that "Koh-i-Noor" is Persian for "Mountain of Light" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor]
- j0e1 8y agoGrowing up in India, all the pencils I used were red and black striped made by Nataraj. I remember seeing yellow pencils in western movies though. https://cwpencils.com/collections/nataraj/products/621-hb-pencil https://cwpencils.com/collections/nataraj/products/621-hb-pe...
- EtienneK 8y agoSame in South Africa. No yellow pencils here: most are red and black striped.
- okadahiroshi 8y agoIn Japan there are yellow pencils but green pencils are more common. https://www.tombow.com/products/writing/pencil/ https://www.tombow.com/products/writing/pencil/
- cfjgvjh 8y agoI practically grew up eating that thing, though I also find mitubishi's maroon pencils to be popular too.
- Nition 8y agoProbably the most common colour in New Zealand is that red and black stripe as well, but usually made by Staedtler[0]. Some other brands also copy the same style[1]. Seems like we need another article on Why Pencils Are Red And Black. [0] https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AMbEQzT.jpg [1] e.g. https://i.imgur.com/mmN943m.jpg https://i.imgur.com/mmN943m.jpg
- murrayb 8y agoYep same in Australia
- OmIsMyShield 8y agoSouth Africa is another antipodean country where pencil means Staedtler in black & red
- KamiCrit 8y agoI'm pretty sure “natural polished” pencils could make a major comeback. Dare I say for the hipsters? Could add an environmental spin on it as well.
- KirinDave 8y agoSo the story is, as it is for nearly every physical artifact in my life, "Because people are easily lured by bright objects and catchy marketing into associating quality with anything but the quality of the goods." I'm reminded of User Testing at Powerset. When we did unbranded search testing of Wikipedia, late-stage Powerset usually won most search comparisons by users. But if we branded the search results against Google, we lost. At first we thought this was an artifact of the test data, but then we ran an experiment where we randomly assigned a brand to our search results and asked users to rank them. Same GvP comparison. The Google branding won. We took it a step further: sometimes random recall searches crept in (there aas essentially no logic to what we put in front of the users other than keyword match). If those got branded "Google", sometimes they still won just by the power of brand association, even against Powerset's sophisticated NL-powered search.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aviv 8y agoI thought this story was going in a different direction, where you had replaced Powerset's logo with one having bright colors, and then it started winning.
- KirinDave 8y agoWell the google logo is a bright colorful child's toy, as opposed to ... well... look it up. Powerset has branding so bad I didn't wanna see it either.
- jimkri 8y agoThis reminds me of a post on HN where someone put a picture of a Duck on a wireless charger, giving it a brand identity and the charger was selling like crazy. Users identified with that brand over a charger that was brandless.
- copperx 8y agoHow can an animal give brand identity? Do you have a link to that post? I'm curious.
- blt 8y agoKoh-I-Noor still makes high quality art supplies, btw.
- choot 8y agoI thought this is because School busss color is Yellow so everything yellow identifies things which has to do with students.
- martinsuchan 8y agoI'm Czech and never heard about this story. I knew about Hardmuth and why Koh-I-Noor was used, but the story of the color was new to me, thanks!
- deepspace 8y agoI stopped reading and mentally discarded the article as trash upon encountering the phrase "diamonds are graphite".
- isomorph 8y agoThey aren’t. Nice bit of local history for Americans though!
- Udik 8y ago... except when they aren't. This reminds me of the famous "why manhole covers are round" question. They aren't, as a quick look at the Wikipedia page can confirm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhole
- crispinb 8y agoBecause you're a parochial American?
- baddash 8y agoSo it has its origins in bullshit. Great.
- RoutinePlayer 8y agoMy reading skills are going down. I was expecting a punchline delivery to the reason why pencils are mostly yellow: "Essentially, because of marketing". Just wasted 5 minutes of my life.
- hevi_jos 8y agoI was raised in Europe, my pencils were always blue like those: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Pencils_hb.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Pencils_... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2r0Y8HUTeMI/UQVsbzQceKI/AAAAAAAAB5g/PF_Q4SXiQ1k/s1600/staedtlernorica1.JPG http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2r0Y8HUTeMI/UQVsbzQceKI/AAAAAAAAB5... I was surprised the first time I saw a yellow pencil, like the IKEA ones.
- richev 8y agoYellow IKEA pencils - in what country? I've only seen unpainted ones (in the UK, and also the US from what I remember, circa 2004-5), with IKEA printed in black on the side.
- tapanjk 8y agoThe article can as well be “Why Pencils are XYZ” where XYZ depends on the country. Once a product is successfull, the original manufacturer and their competitors just continue to copy the attributes of the sucessful product until people can no longer imagine the same product with very different attributes. That is why “Why pencils are yellow” makes sense only in the US, while people living elsewhere are saying: nope, not where I live.
- kchoudhu 8y agoAll my pencils growing up were either red/black or yellow/black, depending on how hard they were. I miss Staedtler pencils.