19 ms·

Has the world become less colourful?

274 points by rubenv 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago
It feels like “colourful” is being flatly accepted as the superior outcome. I’m not sure it is. It’s just different. And it’s style so it’ll come and go. Remember the iMac? Computers were never colourful. Then they were. They’re not really again. I imagine it’ll keep evolving.
Theodores 4y ago
Colour is not driven by fashion directly. There is always a technical innovation or regulatory change. The Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint. An example of regulatory change is food. In the 70's food coloring additives packed a vibrant punch. Decades later with many regulatory changes, those hot pink biscuits are now pinky grey. The palette has been toned down. Although we have came a long way, many colours rely on elements that are quite toxic. We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Take those out on the same basis and things get grey.
- lloydb 4y ago
  Conversely, some trends in color are driven by overt, coordinated planning. Behold The Color Marketing Group [1]. According to their site, they meet "at local and international color forecasting events to interpret, create, forecast, and select colors with the goal of enhancing manufactured goods and services." Here's some of the dreamlike prose with which they describe their attempt to capture the zeitgeist with a particular shade of blue [2]: "Transition, evolution, and moving forward will continue to define the world and its population as 2022 emerges. Questions of trust and truth have been debated with many answered, but still more to come. Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition. "New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort. A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings. "Whether a phone cover, hairdryer, or polo shirt, fashion and personal items are set to embrace New Day as a color equalizer. New Day presents a color that is not only new but suggests familiarity and ease. Genderless and ageless, it is a hue to blend with others, as well as allowing it to stand on its own." [1] https://colormarketing.org/about https://colormarketing.org/about [2] https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/ https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.
  - Theodores 4y ago
    You have piqued my interest, oil paints are going to be made safe for schools and I now want to know how they formulate all the colours. From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      I don't know all the details, some were pretty hidden. I just looked because I saw a "non-toxic" label and doubted it. I remember the dies that I could understand are mostly organic (and thus, may have a limited lifetime). There were many that I gave-up understanding the composition. Anyway, I brought those in 2013. Things may have improved.
thoweriu34234 4y ago
It's not just colours. The world rapidly turning into a real-life "borg-world": same kinds of buildings; same kinds of dresses; same kinds of "world models; same philosophies; and now the same language too. The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere. It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.
- tbossanova 4y ago
  Wouldn’t drabness and sameness be more high-entropy?
- ben_w 4y ago
  I don't know what you mean? I live in an apartment that's about a century old, the style of which was widely (but not universally) replicated all over the industrialised world around that time. The view out tall my office window has some other apartment towers in a different and more recent style, perhaps 50 years old, and some short ones in yet another style that might be less than 10 years old. I suspect that if everything looks the same to you, what you're seeing is the last time a place had major economic growth leading to a building boom. When it comes to world models, I've met an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist, and I've known someone who thinks the best thing about democracy is preventing(!) people from getting what they want, and multiple people who want to end technological growth to let the ecosystem (they use the word "planet") heal, and at least one other who would gladly disassemble the actual planet to build a swarm of O'Neill cylinders to power a colonising swarm of von Neumann replicators to do the same to every star in our future light cone. My mother had anecdotes about relatives causing scandals by marrying outside their denominations of Christianity, I've known at the least atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, at least one literal Satanist, and Wiccans (and probably some more but it hasn't come up in conversation).
- t_mann 4y ago
  My impression is that architecture is becoming increasingly 'rectangular', with exteriors being basically a supremely boring assortment of different rectangular structures. Especially at the lower end, residential construction mainly meant to be sold to people who buy it as an investment rather than for personal use.
arketyp 4y ago
Maybe because we have such rich color reproduction in screens we feel the need to have the rest of our surroundings take on a more neutral stance. In fact this reflects the screens such as they are "blank canvases" that take on whatever content deemed fit for the present purpose or mood.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  In my opinion it's more about risk aversion. It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.
  - arketyp 4y ago
    There is also a risk aversion in buying a monitor which does not have a colored frame, and I think these two notions are related. I personally prefer white walls because I anticipate that I will one day re-style my home according to a new taste. I agree that there is a sense of fear involved, but it is not necessarily about the taste itself so much as the ambulating preference, which perhaps is tacky on another level.
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underdeserver 4y ago
I feel like it's a fashion thing - greyscale, metallic stuff looks sleeker and cleaner. I hate it. I'll take a 50s grandma's house any day over the cookie-cutter machined greyscale apartments I see everywhere today.
defrost 4y ago
> Consider this study, which analysed the colour of everyday objects over time. > Percentage of Pixels across all photos Does anybody have a citation for "this study" ? It's implicitly implied that it comes from some mega cloud storage of personal and professional photos, but it'd be nice to see the actual source and read the methodoloy. ADDENDUM: Found it. https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... > This article analyses a selection of the Science Museum Group Collection. We examined over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained large numbers of everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation. Hmmmmm.
- quicklime 4y ago
  I was wondering the same thing, especially since the x-axis (time) goes all the way back to the year 1800. The oldest surviving photograph is from 1826 according to Wikipedia.
  - klondike_ 4y ago
    I believe that they are categorized according to the age of the object rather than the age of the photograph
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  The dataset is biased in some way. There should be clear changes with the introduction of synthetic dyes.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Looks like we went from bronze into steel colors, with some added blue. That site didn't look at clothes, furniture, and walls, that I imagine saw the largest changes.
- kansface 4y ago
  I distrust the study itself, but I have zero misgivings in the results. We bought a house a couple years ago. I personally looked through several thousand listings over the course of a few months (across the country). The standard house is painted tones of "realtor gray" with equivalent (Scandinavian modern) furniture that is dutifully de-saturated of all color more challenging than industrial pine.
cplli 4y ago
Car colours is something that sometimes worries me, brighter colours are sold as 'extra', while greys are default/cheaper. This leads to some cars basically camouflaging with the road, especially at times like dawn or dusk. There are other colours that make it harder to spot a car depending on location/time-of-day, but from my experience greys and grey-navy-ish are the worst.
- mjevans 4y ago
  Brighter more easily spotted colors, superstitiously, are supposedly more likely to get someone stopped for common minor traffic infractions. Have to also add; if self-driving cars saved everyone from gawker blocks and other annoyances that'd be a net gain for nearly never driving again, at least in more highly regulated areas (presumably interstates and highways first).
  - gilrain 4y ago
    Why do you think it’s a superstition?
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      It's not an urban legend or superstition. It's a function of the lizard brain. It adds an extra "interesting" attribute (many things can do this, color is not the only one) that makes you more likely to get stopped. It's the same reason fishing lures are painted brighter than the natural colors of the things they are trying to emulate. It makes the brain go "hey what's that?". In both cases the object cannot trigger the "prey" workflow if the brain doesn't notice it.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  It might be a self-perpetuating problem. Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. (I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of people put them in their kitchens - leading everybody else to believe that they're actually very popular.)
TimCTRL 4y ago
No wonder I find 80's movies, or 80's themed movies more aesthetically pleasing
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  I do too that is apart from the hairstyles :)
tiborsaas 4y ago
Maybe this is why the Instagram article was a bit weird yesterday? "On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users." https://archive.ph/FF2d1 https://archive.ph/FF2d1 Why even mention the color of the sweater? I can see that clearly on the video.
- snedfree 4y ago
  not everyone who can use a screen reader can see
  - ungamedplayer 4y ago
    And most of us who can see, simply don't care. We don't need that kind of detail.
  - shaftoe 4y ago
    Are there a lot of people using screen readers who also use or care about Instagram? Seems incompatible.
    - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
      There are people who can see with but only effort. Screen readers will allow them to browse quickly without becoming exhausted. For example, only being able to see when they have their eyes almost touching the screen.
  - aussieshibe 4y ago
    I understand the objection to the general "why write X when I can see X" point. Obviously not everyone who can read some text can also watch a video. In this specific case though, is conveying the color of the sweater to people who can't or don't watch the video important? Why mention the color of his sweater, but not the color of his eyes, his hairstyle, or any of countless other unrelated visual details? Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone using a screen reader, maybe these little details give some extra context which, while irrelevant to the topic, help to give "color" to the story which I, as a person who is able to watch the video, am taking for granted?
matthewmacleod 4y ago
Maybe? The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials. There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say has become more muted in my lifetime. I guess I'd say the world has become less saturated rather than less colourful.
- Underphil 4y ago
  I can only speak anecdotally but I comment on the drabness of car colours every time I'm out driving with a passenger. It's extremely noticeable.
  - cokelee 4y ago
    Just came here to agree—It seems to me that both colors and the shapes are converging. Way too much similarity for my taste. Also, in the same way US legislation killed the station wagon and created the SUV, the latest CAFE standards are creating many boring to drive automobiles.
- paulgb 4y ago
  > so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.
Barrin92 4y ago
reminded me immediately of a tweet about the recent season of Dexter (https://twitter.com/_katiestebbins_/status/1461348307901378561 https://twitter.com/_katiestebbins_/status/14613483079013785...). When new TV shows air I can't avoid paying attention to colors now, this kind of 'Scandi-Noir' look for a lack of a better term has become super common.
- Karellen 4y ago
  At least it's not orange-and-teal. Presumably scandi-noir will in turn give way to a different colour fashion in another few years (retro '80s neon?), and we'll be able to get nostalgic for subtle understated lighting and color grading.
rocqua 4y ago
I would argue the graph looking at pixels in photographs is probably more affected by smartphones than any societal trend. Because so many more pictures are taken with smartphones now, the colors produced by smartphones have an impact here. But probably a greater impact is the number of throw-away pictures that are taken and published now as opposed to before. (Not to say that smartphones pictures are bad pictures, but to say that ease of taking pictures, and ease of publishing pictures, removes bariers to 'bad' pictures. Smartphones are probably also responsible for an absolute increase in the total number of good pictures)
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  The graph describes the colours in pictures taken of objects that are part a museum’s collection, not pictures taken with a variety of cameras over time. The behaviour of smartphone cameras would have no effect.
  - rocqua 4y ago
    Thanks for that clarification. That does mean my comment was off the mark.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum but it's still really strange, with missing bits. When fluorescent lights first became popular people complained of headaches from the strange spectrum. They are disfavoured in certain industrial applications because they make some colours harder to see. Semiconductor lighting is even worse in this regard. Radiative re-emission in valance holes emits line spectrums. Only by combining these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light". Recently we've got good at blending doping agents to give mixed spectrums that approximate daylight. If these forms of electronic lighting have holes in their spectra, perhaps that's why an analysis of a corpus of photos shows a change in spectrum over time?
- jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  I have real problem with colour-perception in LED lighting - board game evenings are tricky when I can't tell the piece colours apart so well. Feels like it's just me though...
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to play board games by candlelight. I was in a cabin in the woods. And trust me, it would be much better with LEDs though obviously not perfect. Sometimes the colors just aren't different enough to easily tell apart. It seems like an issue that should be fixed.
  - dangrie158 4y ago
    Maybe the problem is cheap LED lamps. Check for a high color rendering index [1] (CRI >>90) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
    - 4y ago
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thematrixturtle 4y ago
There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot. After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.
  - junga 4y ago
    > I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that. But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.
    - somebodythere 4y ago
      No, I think people in the past probably just had a weaker preference for designs that go together in color and style.
      - towaway15463 4y ago
        That seems unlikely. Look at fashion and decor magazines from the past and you see lots of lively colours that are coordinated. If you go house hunting and see a couple houses that haven’t been updated for decades they have a definite palette.
        lukeramsden 4y ago
        Could possibly be because most households nowadays have to be dual-income, and so there's not a dedicated homemaker with the motivation to do that.
hbossy 4y ago
Quick check on Volkswagen site tells me that changing default silver to red on new Polo increases the price by about $656. That's just about the minimal wage where I live.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Fantastic. One thing that can be added is that since 2021, everything became 50 shades of purple. And I mean annoyingly forced things that should never be that color. Example: the other day I saw some youtube video of upcoming videogames and many of them have, somehow, parts of purple smoke in fire explosions, the engine exhaust of the Millenium Falcon going from its classic light blue to purplish, lights and shadows that do not match the natural environment forced to subtle purplish. Not to mention the mandatory login screen of macOS Monterrey.
- afc 4y ago
  Hmm, feels like confirmation bias? I haven't noticed any recent increase of purple myself. I suppose it could also be a regional/country thing, hmm.
avar 4y ago
It's interesting to think about examples where we've been moving to a better world, or more rational choices based on these seemingly more boring color selections, or where external factors are driving them: 1. White as a car color is much more practical in any place that gets a lot of direct sun. In e.g. South Africa you might drive around all day and not see anything except white cars. In Western and Southern Europe their popularity is a rough approximation of summer heat and sunlight in the area. 2. These photographs are by-and-large leaving ignoring practicalities. Sure, a natural wooden wall is nice, but it also needs more maintenance to look like that than one that's painted white. 3. For kitchens boring colors are practically synonymous with an increase in durability and the ability to withstand water. It's easy to get stainless steel, or a white and black marble countertop, you can't paint stainless steel and still place a hot pan on it, a wooden countertop is going to be subject to rot over time, particularly with water ingress. Once you pick stainless steel or white/black for major surfaces others tend to follow.
- willis936 4y ago
  Ceramics have advantages in the kitchen and are often very vibrant.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    And cost more.
- rvba 4y ago
  You ignore one more thing: white cars are popular because they are often the cheapest. You need to pay more for most color options -> so in poor countries people choose the cheapest model (white paint can be useful in a desert, but in most environments it is harder to clean). Even "boring" colors like silver or black can require an additional fee. Companies often choose white cars as well for their fleets: you can easily put a big company logo on a white car - and it will probably look good. I bet lots of people would choose different colors, if this didnt require to pay additional 1000-2000 dollars. (Also again practicality comes to mind: if you buy a car in an uncommon color you will have problems to get spare parts). This additional fee might be not much for a software developer from Silicon Valley who earns 300k per year, but is a big thing for most of the world. As far as I know, when you want a non-standard color, for many cars it is cheaper to partially disassemble the body and wrap it in those plastic stickers than to ask the factory to paint it (not to mention that it will take few months before you get your car delivered, why you probably want it now). Only a small section of people does this though. I bet if the prices of uncommon colors were lower, one could see much more unusual cars. In fact in some ways the manufacturers are the ones who set the palette (probably based on market research), some colors come in unusual colors straight from the factory. So you 'have' to choose the fancy color, since the car does not come in boring ones. Or at least the unusual color is cheaper (few hundred dollars -> still a lot for many people). For example every now and often a manufacturer comes out with some variant of orange, or orange-red: https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-didn-t-know-came-orange.html https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-... In many ways car color is an illusion of choice: if you dont want to pay 2k dollars and wait few months, you have to take one of the boring colors that are available on the lot for you -> and those 'boring' were selected by the manufacturers, since their market research showed that they will sell. Tons of people cant afford to pay more to have a car that looks different. But judging by the amount of stickers you see on cars, perhaps they would.
golergka 4y ago
Another explanation would be rising car sales in Middle East, Africa and other economically developing regions with very hot climate where white colored cars are simply more economical as they don't heat as much in the sun.
k2xl 4y ago
The study of colors seems to neglect that back before taking photos were ubiquitous, photographers would have a higher likelihood of taking photos of colorful, more interesting things (why waste a photo on something boring?) Regarding cars however, this is likely due to costs of colorful paint as scale.
mmmmpancakes 4y ago
If you are like me and love vibrant colours and struggle to understand the postmodern(?) obsession with drab palettes, I recommend the book Chromophobia by David Batchelor [1]. It contextualizes this phenomenon within broader western art history and is just generally super interesting to someone who has an interest in art and design but isn't embedded in that world. The main takeaway, iirc, is that this isn't a particularly new thing. [1] <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia>
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I've bought a few colorful items recently, 80's print clothing and a rainbow rhinocerous from Amazon (this for reference, because it's awesome: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DT5NMB5?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DT5NMB5?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...) and it is strange how transgressive it feels.
phil21 4y ago
I've been commenting over the past year or two on the color of new cars recently. It seems "security contractor grey" of various shades is all the rage the past few years. My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.
janmarsal 4y ago
Monopolies and the one size fits all mentality. The world has become more globalist and centralized and this is just one of the symptoms. I blame the central planners.
donkeyd 4y ago
I'm a man and I like colors. I have a red car, red shoes and colorful jackets. None of them are especially remarkable, they just have colors on them. I get remarks from colleagues about my shoes, I get remarks from random people on the street about my jacket. These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff. I feel like part of the movement towards grayscale is that people are afraid to stand out. I can always easily find my car in a parking lot, because it stands out. People can find me in a group, because I stand out. I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people, so I just wear what I want to and don't try to blend in. I also feel bad for people who don't wear what they'd like to because they're afraid to stand out, because you only get one lifetime. I personally also hate that the already dreadful winter is made even more dreadful by everyone wearing dark clothing. Please all buy something colorful to wear next winter... It's safer too!
- idontknowifican 4y ago
  i too feel like we see any modern deviation as a statement and not a meaningless preference, like food or people attraction.
- chrismorgan 4y ago
  I almost always wear hi-vis orange shirts, and my preferred hoodie is hi-vis yellow (pity it’s not orange, but that’s the one I’ve got and I don’t need another). Good quality, readily available, comfortable, cheap, and I stand out and am memorable in most contexts, which can be useful. Probably blinds people a little in direct sunlight, though no one’s ever mentioned such a thing. Occasionally throws people for a loop because they assume I must be some kind of tradie. I started this back in 2010 as a safety measure when cycling from home to Uni, and rapidly decided I liked it. I’ve progressively branded myself more and more in bright orange. Funny thing is it isn’t even close to my favourite colour. My car is “velocity red”. Pity it’s not metallic orange or green or some other more interesting colour, but I certainly don’t care enough to foot the bill to repaint it.
  - pc86 4y ago
sharikous 4y ago
The quantitative results about "pixels" are, experimentally speaking, garbage. The do not prove the point even if it feels true. A more thorough analysis would be welcome, possibly with different geographical points. E.g. let's do that in Iran, Russia, Tanzania and a European country. Are there correlations with traditional culture? And with the current political system? I myself have anecdotical accounts of this. It couples with decreasing personalization. Today even the desktop picture is seldom changed by the end user.
chrismorgan 4y ago
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in India (mainly Hyderabad and Kolkata), and can report that India is much more colourful than Australia. Very garishly so, to my eyes. In clothing, building paint, night-time building lighting (… I found myself sometimes wishing coloured LEDs hadn’t been invented), just about everything imaginable. Weddings can be almost painful in the saturation of colour. But Indian cities are also extremely dusty, so that you only see the full extent of some of the colours in monsoon time when the rain washes it all away—especially the vibrant greens of foliage, which in other seasons often appear completely grey or slightly brown. (Aside: I live in Victoria, down in the south east of Australia, and foliage colours are generally fairly muted. I’ve been in Darwin once, up in the northern tropical parts of Australia, and found it really weird to see eucalypts and such that clearly felt Australian to my eyes, but in the vibrant tropical greens that I associated (from experience) with Sri Lanka and parts of India.)
- pteraspidomorph 4y ago
  It does depend on where you live. In southern europe red or orange clay roofing and a range of colors on traditional housing including yellow, pink, orange, etc. makes towns appear much more colorful. In parts of Portugal it's also traditional to paint a broad colorful bar along the bottom of whitewashed outer walls and around doors and windows; the color changes from place to place, and it can be black (I've seen that in the Azores) but also blue, green, scarlet, etc.
- hdesh 4y ago
  Others have also made a similar observation, for India vs US. https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1408429235165749248 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1408429235165749248
- fallinghawks 4y ago
  I went a little ways into Mexico (Tijuana and Ensenada) and bright colors were so ubiquitous and distracting it was hard for me to find necessary stuff like street signs and business signs. I was looking for a certain business which I was assured I couldn't miss. I drove past it several times, but just couldn't see it because of all the other stuff visually shouting at me.
theden 4y ago
A few reasons I can think of that may explain why: * Older photos had more saturation * Colour photography and screens were new and a novelty, so it was pushed more to showcase their tech's capabilities * Muted or monochrome colours by companies became the norm and associated with class (e.g., old rainbow apple logo vs newer monochrome logos), too much colour may be seen as kitschy * Perhaps tied to the postmodern era as a differentiator, bright vibrant colours on products are seen as retro and/or cheap * Also maybe tied to capitalism, vehicles, houses etc. with safe colours are better when it comes time to sell. I believe mass production would also result in more neutral colours * With the ubiquity of cameras, more images of banal environments exist now
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I wonder if another element could be improvements in resolution and quality as well, both on displays and in our fabrics/materials. Simplicity/flat design looks clean in high res screens and materials. It looks boring in low res screens and less fine materials.
folkrav 4y ago
For cars specifically, I have a theory it may be explained by a lot of people go for resale value. Feels more likely to find someone to buy a gray car than a bright green one.
samsolomon 4y ago
To me there's something about the use of color that can become a bit overwhelming. I think it's less about color, but the amount of color and contrast that appears in a given area—perceived busyness. It's difficult to describe. I think it's less about trying to stand out and more about people picking things that they like individually, but may not work well together. It's kind of like going to get ice cream and having them put every topping on it. Gummy bears and mint chocolate chips taste good on their own and in various combinations with other things. Not so much when they are together. As a designer I'm probably more sensitive when it comes to color though.
Kiboneu 4y ago
Computer and phone interfaces tend to be very colorful. Sometimes a UI designer doesn’t know how to fit extra dimensions of information on screen, they encode that information in color, but it doesn’t always work. Colors are picked up by brands and coupled with unimportant information and identities, and we are forced to see this when when we go outside (in civilization). All my displays are greyscale, and when I turn off the color filter I feel like I’m looking at a trash bin full of neon candy. My short term memory suffers (my theory is that I use color as a mnemonic for thinking, and in the mind: re-coloring is more demanding then coloring, and un-coloring seems impossible, given a complex virtual interface). Maybe there’s a kind of color-based sensory exhaustion going on from an over-use of color for brand-related messaging and UI, which is subconsciously or unconsciously compensated by reducing the color of everyday objects.
Borrible 4y ago
“Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to “Model T,” and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and I remarked: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.’ I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production. More than that, they did not particularly care.” Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 Beside, color is all in your mind. Out of it, it's just electromagnetic waves.
- hn92726819 4y ago
  > Beside, color is all in your mind. Out of it, it's just electromagnetic waves No it isn't. Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths. Would you say AM/FM radio waves exist only in our mind? No, they have real world impacts, just like color does.
  - Borrible 4y ago
    >> Would you say AM/FM radio waves exist only in our mind? You're tweaking the analogy. I didn't wrote 'electromagnetic waves exist only in our mind'. I wrote the qualia 'color' exists in the mind as the highly processed result of the activity of certain complicated structures in space-time. Some carriers of these structures, that is some humans that are convinced the idea of science is reasonable, like to call these structures brains. So a lot of people on this planet, but by far not all. Others call them 'soul' or whatever is the currently most useful and hardest to disprove in their environment. The electromagnetic waves that trigger certain sensors in the eyes and trigger that processing are outside those brains. Or at least those brains assume they are. Assume with more or less good reason. But to complicate the thought, that is an assumption. That is, an element of the mind. But anyone in their right mind should back away from the abyss of solipsism now, right? >>Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths So you are not seeing colors, but differences in wave lengths? That maybe, but most of us do see 'colors', that is a subjective perception? Do you see a red rose or a '620 to 750 nm' rose? Sorry, but I just love to ask people, what is 'red'? Just describe it, can't be that hard.
pflenker 4y ago
I think that the conclusion this thread draws is wrong, because less overall colors make color accents stand out more. In other words: If everything pops out, nothing does. Most of our furniture and walls are white, gray/stainless steel or black, and variations from it. Yet, we use color accents in most rooms, e.g. orange towels in the bathroom, or lilac bedclothes. So while our place confirms the overall trend, it does not support the conclusion, as it looks much more colorful than my parent's place, which resembles some of the pictures in that thread. Another important aspect is that the color I like today is not the color I like tomorrow, so buying something with muted colors makes sense, especially for long-lived things like cars or kitchen interiors. It is much easier to change the color accents in a kitchen if you happen to fancy a redecoration that way. And last but not least, it's easier to sell stuff like cars if it is not very colorful.
- ziml77 4y ago
  > Another important aspect is that the color I like today is not the color I like tomorrow This is a pretty big one. Every time I look at buying something colored, I really need to think hard about it. I like the color now, but later I may not. And I'm not going to replace something that isn't broken just because I no longer like the color. There's also a matter of getting things to match. You're basically stuck with your original color choices going forward unless you're okay with a busy set of clashing colors everywhere.
  - kansface 4y ago
    Presumably people weren’t wedded to colors in the past either.
    - ziml77 4y ago
      There may have been a lot of novelty in being able to get things in such a wide variety of colors.
pookha 4y ago
Took a trip to a former East German city in the early 00's. There were subdivisions and rows of identically colored battle ship gray homes. There huge gray burtalist buildings. Gray prisons. Gray schools. Had to have been a depressing way of life...
gwbas1c 4y ago
I used to love black cars, but they were only cool when most cars on the road weren't black. Now they're super-boring. (I still like black cars, though.)
strogonoff 4y ago
The arrival of widely available colour film photography and subsequent pervasiveness of bland JPEG renders changed how humans perceive colour (and likely how they design with colour). Until colour photography, humans didn’t really have a fixed shared anchor as to what the world looks like in general—including colours. All we had was words and paintings. With consumer colour photography, suddenly it seems as if we have that anchor… Except it’s not actually the case. Discarding the fact that our perception of colours and shapes is highly idiosyncratic and happens over time (never as a discrete standalone moment), there’s no medium that’s even remotely close to being capable of reproducing the vast dynamic ranges of scene-referred light values at exposure time (and in case of JPEG or film photography, that data is never available in the first place). What can be conveyed is the tiny range reproducible by screens, film or ink on paper—and unless you take charge of scene data interpretation with your favourite raw processing software, the conversion to that range is a result of camera or film manufacturer’s design. …But even though there’s no true anchor, thinking your phone’s interpretation of reality is just that may be enough for this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy—after all, perception is a socio-psychological phenomenon. We may have used to have our own individual truths, but now it’s very common to believe that bland, sRGB-safe default capture interpretation by our camera or phone is the objective reality of what the world looks like (and anything else must be disclosed as “enhancement” or “processing”)—and it’s not easy for an individual to get rid of that notion if everyone around believes in it. Even the author of tweets like this runs with the same fallacy, and appears to showcase film and digital captures (and even 3D renders?) side by side, even while those are artifacts of drastically different ways of interpreting scene data.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > All we had was words and paintings. If by "painting" you also mean things like lithographs[1] and magic lantern[2] shows and glazed ceramics and dyes used in textiles and rugs, then sure, all we had were words and paintings. I don't think most people would think of those when they thinking "paintings," though. And those are only the human-produced color anchors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern
ramesh31 4y ago
Just look at what happened to McDonalds. Some soulless corporate design committee full of MFAs and MBAs decided that being iconic and unique was too "corny", and remade their brand into empty grey nothingness. A perfect analogy to what has happened with web design as well.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
I've noticed, and absolutely hate that every furniture store or any new building today is basically white, grey and beige. I had to order my furniture custom-made because I wanted a blue sofa and yellow armchair and it's impossible to find, every furniture store used the same small variation of textiles. I believe this trend was primarily driven by economies of scale, and over time it turned into a customer preference by the offer vs. demand paradox.
aaron695 4y ago
sk0g 4y ago
I think one possible reason is colours have become more plentiful, so it's harder to match now. If there's 4 blues to pick from, you're likely to be able to deck out your entire kitchen in matching hues. If there's 50 blues... good luck.
lolsal 4y ago
Colors are trending towards the "may need to sell this kitchen/home/car/thing in the future, so I want to go with a non-offensive, maximally inclusive color for my potential buyers." If you paint your house hot pink, you're probably not concerned about resale value for a long while.
- sosuke 4y ago
  I feel you've got the thrust of it. I see our manufacturing and boom of middle class ownership starting off with wild color choices only to then find out that it makes resale harder. Every house resold in my neighborhood paints the brick house white. Also color fades more noticeably adding to upkeep cost. This is my two cents.
  - corrral 4y ago
    People also move a lot more than they used to. That could be part of it. Who gives a shit if anyone else likes the kitchen color scheme that you love, if you're going to be in the house 20+ years? If you're only going to be in it 3-5 years, though....
- pavon 4y ago
  Even with that aspect, the consensus of what is considered neutral non-offensive household colors has changed from a warm brown palette (off-white walls, brown wood floor or tan carpet, wood or off-white cabinets) to a cool grey palette. That is a big shift. In the 90's or earlier painting a room grey would have been considered an opinionated decision that might turn off potential buyers.
  - lolsal 4y ago
    It's true, trends evolve.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
The graph presented in the source doesn’t quite give it off, but my dad, an industrial designer and professor, always mentioned how innovations in plastic, materials and manufacturing in the 1960-1980’s made everyone in his field just crazy for all the new colors and shapes that were suddenly possible. I’m sure a lot of us can recall something similar in more recent niches like UI design. After a period of excitement with all the new possibilities comes a more sober minimalistic function-first approach. I don’t think this is something to lament - color has become cheap and widely available so it has lost the meaning it had in the 60’s and earlier. If anything, we could be talking about a brief color-heavy time period that is just ending. One in which everything became unreasonably colorful thanks to unrestrained consumption and petro-chemical innovations.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
Has the world become less colorful? Even if so, this isn't bad. There's something to be said for a world which doesn't use colors except functionally. * A red thing is red because it needs to be seen, like a STOP sign. * A grey thing is grey because there's no need for it to be not grey. I'm fine with either a creative colorful world or a functionally colorful world. Most of my stuff is grey. My glasses are purple, because it serves my interests right now for my face to be memorable. In an urban survival situation, say, I'd want the reverse: "be the grey man" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNWAgdQoaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNWAgdQoaw)
squarefoot 4y ago
A lot more products are now built by machines, therefore saving on something like buying more different paint or less time "wasted" to reconfigure the production line makes sense from a business point of view. Thankfully, the real world (sun, mountains, lakes, my shirts) is still colorful as before.
HACKER501 4y ago
Sometimes people shame of what there wearing colors or something else but you chose what you want! So everyone can wear be what he wants to be/wear. Its crazy if you think about it people dont like colors because of colors everything is possible. Its just like gravity. HACKER501.
gnicholas 4y ago
Some car companies charge extra if you don’t want your vehicle in white/black/silver. I heard that Tesla charges $2k extra if you want a red Tesla. I think most are closer to $1k, which is still a pretty hefty charge for a purely aesthetic option.
kansface 4y ago
Quite a few just so stories in here - I mostly disagree with most in favor of my own: We shed our colors because we lost the emotions expressed by those colors in our lexicon. We don’t put joy, awe, wonder, or whimsy on display. Those emotions aren’t just gone from our palette (walls, furniture, consumer products, cars, fridges), they are non-existent in and of themselves in society at large. Our Art is outrage, performative or otherwise. News is outrage. Media is outrage. Popular culture is outrage. If you aren’t outraged yourself, you are part of the problem (needs more (out)rage). We will return to playful objects, playful colors and forms when it is once again permissible to express playfulness. We will return to joyous colors that express joy for joy’s sake when we have joy to express… see also the revival of mid-century modern as an implicit revival of the optimism of the 50s.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  This hits very close to home for some reason. Thinking about music, it seems that most emotions have gone from that art. Maybe this is why I enjoy stand-up comedy so much - I feel all four of those emotions when watching it.
MR4D 4y ago
Car colors certainly have gotten more bland: https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...
mc32 4y ago
There was a time when color was expensive, dyes, paints, etc. Ford famously only wanted black cars… No. I think we’re living in a more colorful world because color is cheap.
v4dok 4y ago
I mainly wear grayscale and maybe some beige. I like grayscale cars and appliances. Why? Simply because it's easier on the eye. I grew up in a colour overload and I'm very glad things become more neutral. I'm able to appreciate colour much more when it's not everywhere all the time. Also, utility and convinience are much more increased with neutral colours. Clothes are easier to match, replace, wear again. Cars and appliances are easier to resell.
clove 4y ago
I lived in South Korea, and - I shit you not - if you look at the cars on the road 99% of them are either black, white, or gray.
ilaksh 4y ago
Amazing how most of the people in this thread are denying that trends exist or that they are influenced by them. The thing about fashion though is that it's subconscious. You would not know it affected you unless you are very meta-cognizant in this particular way. ( Which people should educate and train themselves about subtle cognitive biases.)
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
UK is far more colourful than North America
wink 4y ago
The wood examples are disingenuous I think. I'm close to 40 and everyone I know in my age group, where I grew up... their parents all had the same type of furniture with the same wood types. We all had the same colors in our kids' bedrooms. It was three types of local wood, and the odd outlier. Surprise! When we grew up we didn't want our apartments to look like our parents set them up in the 80s or 90s. My living room is (faux) dark cherry, my bedframe + nightstands are (painted) dark wood, my kitchen is light beige.

274 points by rubenv 4y ago

It feels like “colourful” is being flatly accepted as the superior outcome. I’m not sure it is. It’s just different. And it’s style so it’ll come and go. Remember the iMac? Computers were never colourful. Then they were. They’re not really again. I imagine it’ll keep evolving.

Theodores 4y ago

Colour is not driven by fashion directly. There is always a technical innovation or regulatory change. The Ford Focus pioneered a new 'silver' paint that was formulated differently to 'silver' paints that had gone on before. 'Silver' was no longer an expensive option, the base model had it. This proved popular and the trend was set, silver cars took over at the start of the century, using the new formula paint. An example of regulatory change is food. In the 70's food coloring additives packed a vibrant punch. Decades later with many regulatory changes, those hot pink biscuits are now pinky grey. The palette has been toned down. Although we have came a long way, many colours rely on elements that are quite toxic. We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Take those out on the same basis and things get grey.

lloydb 4y ago
Conversely, some trends in color are driven by overt, coordinated planning. Behold The Color Marketing Group [1]. According to their site, they meet "at local and international color forecasting events to interpret, create, forecast, and select colors with the goal of enhancing manufactured goods and services." Here's some of the dreamlike prose with which they describe their attempt to capture the zeitgeist with a particular shade of blue [2]: "Transition, evolution, and moving forward will continue to define the world and its population as 2022 emerges. Questions of trust and truth have been debated with many answered, but still more to come. Color Marketing Group’s North America 2022 Key Color, New Day, is the color response for a time still in transition. "New Day suggests confidence and familiarity to greet 2022 with a sense of comfort. A light, fresh blue with red influences, New Day is an inspiring color designed to convey the classic connotation of hope and new beginnings. "Whether a phone cover, hairdryer, or polo shirt, fashion and personal items are set to embrace New Day as a color equalizer. New Day presents a color that is not only new but suggests familiarity and ease. Genderless and ageless, it is a hue to blend with others, as well as allowing it to stand on its own." [1] https://colormarketing.org/about https://colormarketing.org/about [2] https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/ https://colormarketing.org/2020/11/20/key-color-new-day/
marcosdumay 4y ago
> We might have got rid of the lead, but cadmium? Cobalt? Last time I brought an oil palette and looked at the paints composition, the most toxic thing I could find was copper. And it was as colorful as any oil palette.
- Theodores 4y ago
  You have piqued my interest, oil paints are going to be made safe for schools and I now want to know how they formulate all the colours. From what I understand you can get many things out of crude oil but you can't just rearrange a few hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms to get any colour in the sRGB colour space. So what is the science of safe paints? Got to know now.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I don't know all the details, some were pretty hidden. I just looked because I saw a "non-toxic" label and doubted it. I remember the dies that I could understand are mostly organic (and thus, may have a limited lifetime). There were many that I gave-up understanding the composition. Anyway, I brought those in 2013. Things may have improved.

thoweriu34234 4y ago

It's not just colours. The world rapidly turning into a real-life "borg-world": same kinds of buildings; same kinds of dresses; same kinds of "world models; same philosophies; and now the same language too. The world is for all real purposes has been gobbled up by the Anglosphere. It's all but dead; I'm sure many people realize how drab and low-entropy our world is today.

tbossanova 4y ago
Wouldn’t drabness and sameness be more high-entropy?
ben_w 4y ago
I don't know what you mean? I live in an apartment that's about a century old, the style of which was widely (but not universally) replicated all over the industrialised world around that time. The view out tall my office window has some other apartment towers in a different and more recent style, perhaps 50 years old, and some short ones in yet another style that might be less than 10 years old. I suspect that if everything looks the same to you, what you're seeing is the last time a place had major economic growth leading to a building boom. When it comes to world models, I've met an anarcho-capitalist and an anarcho-communist, and I've known someone who thinks the best thing about democracy is preventing(!) people from getting what they want, and multiple people who want to end technological growth to let the ecosystem (they use the word "planet") heal, and at least one other who would gladly disassemble the actual planet to build a swarm of O'Neill cylinders to power a colonising swarm of von Neumann replicators to do the same to every star in our future light cone. My mother had anecdotes about relatives causing scandals by marrying outside their denominations of Christianity, I've known at the least atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, at least one literal Satanist, and Wiccans (and probably some more but it hasn't come up in conversation).
t_mann 4y ago
My impression is that architecture is becoming increasingly 'rectangular', with exteriors being basically a supremely boring assortment of different rectangular structures. Especially at the lower end, residential construction mainly meant to be sold to people who buy it as an investment rather than for personal use.

arketyp 4y ago

Maybe because we have such rich color reproduction in screens we feel the need to have the rest of our surroundings take on a more neutral stance. In fact this reflects the screens such as they are "blank canvases" that take on whatever content deemed fit for the present purpose or mood.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago
In my opinion it's more about risk aversion. It is difficult to use a lot of color and be 'tasteful' it is a lot easier to use neutral colors even if the end result is dull. People are too afraid of being tacky so they stay in the nordic ikea safe zone.
- arketyp 4y ago
  There is also a risk aversion in buying a monitor which does not have a colored frame, and I think these two notions are related. I personally prefer white walls because I anticipate that I will one day re-style my home according to a new taste. I agree that there is a sense of fear involved, but it is not necessarily about the taste itself so much as the ambulating preference, which perhaps is tacky on another level.

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underdeserver 4y ago

I feel like it's a fashion thing - greyscale, metallic stuff looks sleeker and cleaner. I hate it. I'll take a 50s grandma's house any day over the cookie-cutter machined greyscale apartments I see everywhere today.

defrost 4y ago

> Consider this study, which analysed the colour of everyday objects over time. > Percentage of Pixels across all photos Does anybody have a citation for "this study" ? It's implicitly implied that it comes from some mega cloud storage of personal and professional photos, but it'd be nice to see the actual source and read the methodoloy. ADDENDUM: Found it. https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... > This article analyses a selection of the Science Museum Group Collection. We examined over 7,000 photographs of objects from 21 categories. The categories were selected on the basis that they contained large numbers of everyday or familiar objects. These categories range from photographic technology to time measurement, lighting to printing and writing, and domestic appliances to navigation. Hmmmmm.

quicklime 4y ago
I was wondering the same thing, especially since the x-axis (time) goes all the way back to the year 1800. The oldest surviving photograph is from 1826 according to Wikipedia.
- klondike_ 4y ago
  I believe that they are categorized according to the age of the object rather than the age of the photograph
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
The dataset is biased in some way. There should be clear changes with the introduction of synthetic dyes.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Looks like we went from bronze into steel colors, with some added blue. That site didn't look at clothes, furniture, and walls, that I imagine saw the largest changes.
kansface 4y ago
I distrust the study itself, but I have zero misgivings in the results. We bought a house a couple years ago. I personally looked through several thousand listings over the course of a few months (across the country). The standard house is painted tones of "realtor gray" with equivalent (Scandinavian modern) furniture that is dutifully de-saturated of all color more challenging than industrial pine.

cplli 4y ago

Car colours is something that sometimes worries me, brighter colours are sold as 'extra', while greys are default/cheaper. This leads to some cars basically camouflaging with the road, especially at times like dawn or dusk. There are other colours that make it harder to spot a car depending on location/time-of-day, but from my experience greys and grey-navy-ish are the worst.

mjevans 4y ago
Brighter more easily spotted colors, superstitiously, are supposedly more likely to get someone stopped for common minor traffic infractions. Have to also add; if self-driving cars saved everyone from gawker blocks and other annoyances that'd be a net gain for nearly never driving again, at least in more highly regulated areas (presumably interstates and highways first).
- gilrain 4y ago
  Why do you think it’s a superstition?
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    It's not an urban legend or superstition. It's a function of the lizard brain. It adds an extra "interesting" attribute (many things can do this, color is not the only one) that makes you more likely to get stopped. It's the same reason fishing lures are painted brighter than the natural colors of the things they are trying to emulate. It makes the brain go "hey what's that?". In both cases the object cannot trigger the "prey" workflow if the brain doesn't notice it.
ThePadawan 4y ago
It might be a self-perpetuating problem. Maybe people prefer (red, green, bright blue), but they fear that they won't be able to sell their car because of its color. So they buy white. (I read somewhere [so take this with a grain of salt] that this effect happens with marble kitchen countertops: not that many homeowners actually like them, but they believe that potential buyers might, so an overproportional amount of people put them in their kitchens - leading everybody else to believe that they're actually very popular.)

TimCTRL 4y ago

No wonder I find 80's movies, or 80's themed movies more aesthetically pleasing

nicolas_t 4y ago
I do too that is apart from the hairstyles :)

tiborsaas 4y ago

Maybe this is why the Instagram article was a bit weird yesterday? "On Tuesday morning, Instagram head Adam Mosseri appeared in full damage control mode. Facing the camera and wearing a bright yellow sweater, he attempted to quash a growing revolt from some of Instagram’s most prominent users." https://archive.ph/FF2d1 https://archive.ph/FF2d1 Why even mention the color of the sweater? I can see that clearly on the video.

snedfree 4y ago
not everyone who can use a screen reader can see
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  And most of us who can see, simply don't care. We don't need that kind of detail.
- shaftoe 4y ago
  Are there a lot of people using screen readers who also use or care about Instagram? Seems incompatible.
  - Karawebnetwork 4y ago
    There are people who can see with but only effort. Screen readers will allow them to browse quickly without becoming exhausted. For example, only being able to see when they have their eyes almost touching the screen.
- aussieshibe 4y ago
  I understand the objection to the general "why write X when I can see X" point. Obviously not everyone who can read some text can also watch a video. In this specific case though, is conveying the color of the sweater to people who can't or don't watch the video important? Why mention the color of his sweater, but not the color of his eyes, his hairstyle, or any of countless other unrelated visual details? Trying to put myself in the shoes of someone using a screen reader, maybe these little details give some extra context which, while irrelevant to the topic, help to give "color" to the story which I, as a person who is able to watch the video, am taking for granted?

matthewmacleod 4y ago

Maybe? The headline graphic is from https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer-vision-to-explore-the-science-museum-c4b4f1cbd72c https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer... which really tells us about the colour of a subset of objects in the Science Museum's collection – so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials. There does seem to be maybe 20% more neutral-coloured cars since 1990, though. Interior design is probably the thing I'd most readily say has become more muted in my lifetime. I guess I'd say the world has become less saturated rather than less colourful.

Underphil 4y ago
I can only speak anecdotally but I comment on the drabness of car colours every time I'm out driving with a passenger. It's extremely noticeable.
- cokelee 4y ago
  Just came here to agree—It seems to me that both colors and the shapes are converging. Way too much similarity for my taste. Also, in the same way US legislation killed the station wagon and created the SUV, the latest CAFE standards are creating many boring to drive automobiles.
paulgb 4y ago
> so a bit of a biased sample, and I'd wager primarily due to changes in materials Yes, the wood telegraph in the article is a good example of this. Because of wood’s texture, it contains a bunch of colors from red to yellow when you look at it at the pixel level. It’s more colorful than an iPhone, but the variety of pixels alone gives the impression that it’s more colorful than it is.

Barrin92 4y ago

reminded me immediately of a tweet about the recent season of Dexter (https://twitter.com/_katiestebbins_/status/1461348307901378561 https://twitter.com/_katiestebbins_/status/14613483079013785...). When new TV shows air I can't avoid paying attention to colors now, this kind of 'Scandi-Noir' look for a lack of a better term has become super common.

Karellen 4y ago
At least it's not orange-and-teal. Presumably scandi-noir will in turn give way to a different colour fashion in another few years (retro '80s neon?), and we'll be able to get nostalgic for subtle understated lighting and color grading.

rocqua 4y ago

I would argue the graph looking at pixels in photographs is probably more affected by smartphones than any societal trend. Because so many more pictures are taken with smartphones now, the colors produced by smartphones have an impact here. But probably a greater impact is the number of throw-away pictures that are taken and published now as opposed to before. (Not to say that smartphones pictures are bad pictures, but to say that ease of taking pictures, and ease of publishing pictures, removes bariers to 'bad' pictures. Smartphones are probably also responsible for an absolute increase in the total number of good pictures)

matthewmacleod 4y ago
The graph describes the colours in pictures taken of objects that are part a museum’s collection, not pictures taken with a variety of cameras over time. The behaviour of smartphone cameras would have no effect.
- rocqua 4y ago
  Thanks for that clarification. That does mean my comment was off the mark.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

An explanation might be LED lighting. Sunlight, candle-light and resistive filament lights (incandescent) have a broadband spectrum. Through most of history we've viewed the world lit by these sources. Moving to fluorescent lights causes spectral quantisation as the frequencies are due to electronic band transitions in the gas. The phosphor absorbs and re-emits energy in different bands that fills out the spectrum but it's still really strange, with missing bits. When fluorescent lights first became popular people complained of headaches from the strange spectrum. They are disfavoured in certain industrial applications because they make some colours harder to see. Semiconductor lighting is even worse in this regard. Radiative re-emission in valance holes emits line spectrums. Only by combining these do we trick the eye into seeing "white light". Recently we've got good at blending doping agents to give mixed spectrums that approximate daylight. If these forms of electronic lighting have holes in their spectra, perhaps that's why an analysis of a corpus of photos shows a change in spectrum over time?

jan_Inkepa 4y ago
I have real problem with colour-perception in LED lighting - board game evenings are tricky when I can't tell the piece colours apart so well. Feels like it's just me though...
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to play board games by candlelight. I was in a cabin in the woods. And trust me, it would be much better with LEDs though obviously not perfect. Sometimes the colors just aren't different enough to easily tell apart. It seems like an issue that should be fixed.
- dangrie158 4y ago
  Maybe the problem is cheap LED lamps. Check for a high color rendering index [1] (CRI >>90) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index
  - 4y ago

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thematrixturtle 4y ago

There is a famous if possibly apocryphal study where random people were asked to rate various toaster colors, and everybody swooned over lime green and hot pink and whatnot. After they finished, they were told that as their prize they could take one of the toasters home -- and everybody chose white, stainless steel or black.

AmericanChopper 4y ago
The reason for that seems obvious to me. Grey, steel, white and black will work in basically every kitchen. If you want a more colorful pallet in any room in your house, then you need to put a lot more thought into planning it. I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that.
- junga 4y ago
  > I think most people aren’t highly motivated to do that. But they were in the past? I don't know but I wonder why this might have changed.
  - somebodythere 4y ago
    No, I think people in the past probably just had a weaker preference for designs that go together in color and style.
    - towaway15463 4y ago
      That seems unlikely. Look at fashion and decor magazines from the past and you see lots of lively colours that are coordinated. If you go house hunting and see a couple houses that haven’t been updated for decades they have a definite palette.
      - lukeramsden 4y ago
        Could possibly be because most households nowadays have to be dual-income, and so there's not a dedicated homemaker with the motivation to do that.

hbossy 4y ago

Quick check on Volkswagen site tells me that changing default silver to red on new Polo increases the price by about $656. That's just about the minimal wage where I live.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

Fantastic. One thing that can be added is that since 2021, everything became 50 shades of purple. And I mean annoyingly forced things that should never be that color. Example: the other day I saw some youtube video of upcoming videogames and many of them have, somehow, parts of purple smoke in fire explosions, the engine exhaust of the Millenium Falcon going from its classic light blue to purplish, lights and shadows that do not match the natural environment forced to subtle purplish. Not to mention the mandatory login screen of macOS Monterrey.

afc 4y ago
Hmm, feels like confirmation bias? I haven't noticed any recent increase of purple myself. I suppose it could also be a regional/country thing, hmm.

avar 4y ago

It's interesting to think about examples where we've been moving to a better world, or more rational choices based on these seemingly more boring color selections, or where external factors are driving them: 1. White as a car color is much more practical in any place that gets a lot of direct sun. In e.g. South Africa you might drive around all day and not see anything except white cars. In Western and Southern Europe their popularity is a rough approximation of summer heat and sunlight in the area. 2. These photographs are by-and-large leaving ignoring practicalities. Sure, a natural wooden wall is nice, but it also needs more maintenance to look like that than one that's painted white. 3. For kitchens boring colors are practically synonymous with an increase in durability and the ability to withstand water. It's easy to get stainless steel, or a white and black marble countertop, you can't paint stainless steel and still place a hot pan on it, a wooden countertop is going to be subject to rot over time, particularly with water ingress. Once you pick stainless steel or white/black for major surfaces others tend to follow.

willis936 4y ago
Ceramics have advantages in the kitchen and are often very vibrant.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  And cost more.
rvba 4y ago
You ignore one more thing: white cars are popular because they are often the cheapest. You need to pay more for most color options -> so in poor countries people choose the cheapest model (white paint can be useful in a desert, but in most environments it is harder to clean). Even "boring" colors like silver or black can require an additional fee. Companies often choose white cars as well for their fleets: you can easily put a big company logo on a white car - and it will probably look good. I bet lots of people would choose different colors, if this didnt require to pay additional 1000-2000 dollars. (Also again practicality comes to mind: if you buy a car in an uncommon color you will have problems to get spare parts). This additional fee might be not much for a software developer from Silicon Valley who earns 300k per year, but is a big thing for most of the world. As far as I know, when you want a non-standard color, for many cars it is cheaper to partially disassemble the body and wrap it in those plastic stickers than to ask the factory to paint it (not to mention that it will take few months before you get your car delivered, why you probably want it now). Only a small section of people does this though. I bet if the prices of uncommon colors were lower, one could see much more unusual cars. In fact in some ways the manufacturers are the ones who set the palette (probably based on market research), some colors come in unusual colors straight from the factory. So you 'have' to choose the fancy color, since the car does not come in boring ones. Or at least the unusual color is cheaper (few hundred dollars -> still a lot for many people). For example every now and often a manufacturer comes out with some variant of orange, or orange-red: https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-didn-t-know-came-orange.html https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2021/12/orange-cars-you-... In many ways car color is an illusion of choice: if you dont want to pay 2k dollars and wait few months, you have to take one of the boring colors that are available on the lot for you -> and those 'boring' were selected by the manufacturers, since their market research showed that they will sell. Tons of people cant afford to pay more to have a car that looks different. But judging by the amount of stickers you see on cars, perhaps they would.

golergka 4y ago

Another explanation would be rising car sales in Middle East, Africa and other economically developing regions with very hot climate where white colored cars are simply more economical as they don't heat as much in the sun.

k2xl 4y ago

The study of colors seems to neglect that back before taking photos were ubiquitous, photographers would have a higher likelihood of taking photos of colorful, more interesting things (why waste a photo on something boring?) Regarding cars however, this is likely due to costs of colorful paint as scale.

mmmmpancakes 4y ago

If you are like me and love vibrant colours and struggle to understand the postmodern(?) obsession with drab palettes, I recommend the book Chromophobia by David Batchelor [1]. It contextualizes this phenomenon within broader western art history and is just generally super interesting to someone who has an interest in art and design but isn't embedded in that world. The main takeaway, iirc, is that this isn't a particularly new thing. [1] <https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/351621.Chromophobia>

mikkergp 4y ago
I've bought a few colorful items recently, 80's print clothing and a rainbow rhinocerous from Amazon (this for reference, because it's awesome: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DT5NMB5?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DT5NMB5?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_...) and it is strange how transgressive it feels.

phil21 4y ago

I've been commenting over the past year or two on the color of new cars recently. It seems "security contractor grey" of various shades is all the rage the past few years. My pet theory is that car colors tend to reflect society's mood, and we've been in a dour one for some time.

janmarsal 4y ago

Monopolies and the one size fits all mentality. The world has become more globalist and centralized and this is just one of the symptoms. I blame the central planners.

donkeyd 4y ago

I'm a man and I like colors. I have a red car, red shoes and colorful jackets. None of them are especially remarkable, they just have colors on them. I get remarks from colleagues about my shoes, I get remarks from random people on the street about my jacket. These people don't tend to be very positive about it, yet they feel the need to say something about my appearance, because I wear colorful stuff. I feel like part of the movement towards grayscale is that people are afraid to stand out. I can always easily find my car in a parking lot, because it stands out. People can find me in a group, because I stand out. I'm glad I don't care too much about the opinions of other people, so I just wear what I want to and don't try to blend in. I also feel bad for people who don't wear what they'd like to because they're afraid to stand out, because you only get one lifetime. I personally also hate that the already dreadful winter is made even more dreadful by everyone wearing dark clothing. Please all buy something colorful to wear next winter... It's safer too!

idontknowifican 4y ago
i too feel like we see any modern deviation as a statement and not a meaningless preference, like food or people attraction.
chrismorgan 4y ago
I almost always wear hi-vis orange shirts, and my preferred hoodie is hi-vis yellow (pity it’s not orange, but that’s the one I’ve got and I don’t need another). Good quality, readily available, comfortable, cheap, and I stand out and am memorable in most contexts, which can be useful. Probably blinds people a little in direct sunlight, though no one’s ever mentioned such a thing. Occasionally throws people for a loop because they assume I must be some kind of tradie. I started this back in 2010 as a safety measure when cycling from home to Uni, and rapidly decided I liked it. I’ve progressively branded myself more and more in bright orange. Funny thing is it isn’t even close to my favourite colour. My car is “velocity red”. Pity it’s not metallic orange or green or some other more interesting colour, but I certainly don’t care enough to foot the bill to repaint it.
- pc86 4y ago

sharikous 4y ago

The quantitative results about "pixels" are, experimentally speaking, garbage. The do not prove the point even if it feels true. A more thorough analysis would be welcome, possibly with different geographical points. E.g. let's do that in Iran, Russia, Tanzania and a European country. Are there correlations with traditional culture? And with the current political system? I myself have anecdotical accounts of this. It couples with decreasing personalization. Today even the desktop picture is seldom changed by the end user.

chrismorgan 4y ago

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in India (mainly Hyderabad and Kolkata), and can report that India is much more colourful than Australia. Very garishly so, to my eyes. In clothing, building paint, night-time building lighting (… I found myself sometimes wishing coloured LEDs hadn’t been invented), just about everything imaginable. Weddings can be almost painful in the saturation of colour. But Indian cities are also extremely dusty, so that you only see the full extent of some of the colours in monsoon time when the rain washes it all away—especially the vibrant greens of foliage, which in other seasons often appear completely grey or slightly brown. (Aside: I live in Victoria, down in the south east of Australia, and foliage colours are generally fairly muted. I’ve been in Darwin once, up in the northern tropical parts of Australia, and found it really weird to see eucalypts and such that clearly felt Australian to my eyes, but in the vibrant tropical greens that I associated (from experience) with Sri Lanka and parts of India.)

pteraspidomorph 4y ago
It does depend on where you live. In southern europe red or orange clay roofing and a range of colors on traditional housing including yellow, pink, orange, etc. makes towns appear much more colorful. In parts of Portugal it's also traditional to paint a broad colorful bar along the bottom of whitewashed outer walls and around doors and windows; the color changes from place to place, and it can be black (I've seen that in the Azores) but also blue, green, scarlet, etc.
hdesh 4y ago
Others have also made a similar observation, for India vs US. https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1408429235165749248 https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1408429235165749248
fallinghawks 4y ago
I went a little ways into Mexico (Tijuana and Ensenada) and bright colors were so ubiquitous and distracting it was hard for me to find necessary stuff like street signs and business signs. I was looking for a certain business which I was assured I couldn't miss. I drove past it several times, but just couldn't see it because of all the other stuff visually shouting at me.

theden 4y ago

A few reasons I can think of that may explain why: * Older photos had more saturation * Colour photography and screens were new and a novelty, so it was pushed more to showcase their tech's capabilities * Muted or monochrome colours by companies became the norm and associated with class (e.g., old rainbow apple logo vs newer monochrome logos), too much colour may be seen as kitschy * Perhaps tied to the postmodern era as a differentiator, bright vibrant colours on products are seen as retro and/or cheap * Also maybe tied to capitalism, vehicles, houses etc. with safe colours are better when it comes time to sell. I believe mass production would also result in more neutral colours * With the ubiquity of cameras, more images of banal environments exist now

mikkergp 4y ago
I wonder if another element could be improvements in resolution and quality as well, both on displays and in our fabrics/materials. Simplicity/flat design looks clean in high res screens and materials. It looks boring in low res screens and less fine materials.

folkrav 4y ago

For cars specifically, I have a theory it may be explained by a lot of people go for resale value. Feels more likely to find someone to buy a gray car than a bright green one.

samsolomon 4y ago

To me there's something about the use of color that can become a bit overwhelming. I think it's less about color, but the amount of color and contrast that appears in a given area—perceived busyness. It's difficult to describe. I think it's less about trying to stand out and more about people picking things that they like individually, but may not work well together. It's kind of like going to get ice cream and having them put every topping on it. Gummy bears and mint chocolate chips taste good on their own and in various combinations with other things. Not so much when they are together. As a designer I'm probably more sensitive when it comes to color though.

Kiboneu 4y ago

Computer and phone interfaces tend to be very colorful. Sometimes a UI designer doesn’t know how to fit extra dimensions of information on screen, they encode that information in color, but it doesn’t always work. Colors are picked up by brands and coupled with unimportant information and identities, and we are forced to see this when when we go outside (in civilization). All my displays are greyscale, and when I turn off the color filter I feel like I’m looking at a trash bin full of neon candy. My short term memory suffers (my theory is that I use color as a mnemonic for thinking, and in the mind: re-coloring is more demanding then coloring, and un-coloring seems impossible, given a complex virtual interface). Maybe there’s a kind of color-based sensory exhaustion going on from an over-use of color for brand-related messaging and UI, which is subconsciously or unconsciously compensated by reducing the color of everyday objects.

Borrible 4y ago

“Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to “Model T,” and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and I remarked: ‘Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.’ I cannot say that any one agreed with me. The selling people could not of course see the advantages that a single model would bring about in production. More than that, they did not particularly care.” Henry Ford in collaboration with Samuel Crowther in My Life and Work. 1922. Page 72 Beside, color is all in your mind. Out of it, it's just electromagnetic waves.

hn92726819 4y ago
> Beside, color is all in your mind. Out of it, it's just electromagnetic waves No it isn't. Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths. Would you say AM/FM radio waves exist only in our mind? No, they have real world impacts, just like color does.
- Borrible 4y ago
  >> Would you say AM/FM radio waves exist only in our mind? You're tweaking the analogy. I didn't wrote 'electromagnetic waves exist only in our mind'. I wrote the qualia 'color' exists in the mind as the highly processed result of the activity of certain complicated structures in space-time. Some carriers of these structures, that is some humans that are convinced the idea of science is reasonable, like to call these structures brains. So a lot of people on this planet, but by far not all. Others call them 'soul' or whatever is the currently most useful and hardest to disprove in their environment. The electromagnetic waves that trigger certain sensors in the eyes and trigger that processing are outside those brains. Or at least those brains assume they are. Assume with more or less good reason. But to complicate the thought, that is an assumption. That is, an element of the mind. But anyone in their right mind should back away from the abyss of solipsism now, right? >>Our eyes are sensitive enough to detect differences in the wavelengths So you are not seeing colors, but differences in wave lengths? That maybe, but most of us do see 'colors', that is a subjective perception? Do you see a red rose or a '620 to 750 nm' rose? Sorry, but I just love to ask people, what is 'red'? Just describe it, can't be that hard.

pflenker 4y ago

I think that the conclusion this thread draws is wrong, because less overall colors make color accents stand out more. In other words: If everything pops out, nothing does. Most of our furniture and walls are white, gray/stainless steel or black, and variations from it. Yet, we use color accents in most rooms, e.g. orange towels in the bathroom, or lilac bedclothes. So while our place confirms the overall trend, it does not support the conclusion, as it looks much more colorful than my parent's place, which resembles some of the pictures in that thread. Another important aspect is that the color I like today is not the color I like tomorrow, so buying something with muted colors makes sense, especially for long-lived things like cars or kitchen interiors. It is much easier to change the color accents in a kitchen if you happen to fancy a redecoration that way. And last but not least, it's easier to sell stuff like cars if it is not very colorful.

ziml77 4y ago
> Another important aspect is that the color I like today is not the color I like tomorrow This is a pretty big one. Every time I look at buying something colored, I really need to think hard about it. I like the color now, but later I may not. And I'm not going to replace something that isn't broken just because I no longer like the color. There's also a matter of getting things to match. You're basically stuck with your original color choices going forward unless you're okay with a busy set of clashing colors everywhere.
- kansface 4y ago
  Presumably people weren’t wedded to colors in the past either.
  - ziml77 4y ago
    There may have been a lot of novelty in being able to get things in such a wide variety of colors.

pookha 4y ago

Took a trip to a former East German city in the early 00's. There were subdivisions and rows of identically colored battle ship gray homes. There huge gray burtalist buildings. Gray prisons. Gray schools. Had to have been a depressing way of life...

gwbas1c 4y ago

I used to love black cars, but they were only cool when most cars on the road weren't black. Now they're super-boring. (I still like black cars, though.)

strogonoff 4y ago

The arrival of widely available colour film photography and subsequent pervasiveness of bland JPEG renders changed how humans perceive colour (and likely how they design with colour). Until colour photography, humans didn’t really have a fixed shared anchor as to what the world looks like in general—including colours. All we had was words and paintings. With consumer colour photography, suddenly it seems as if we have that anchor… Except it’s not actually the case. Discarding the fact that our perception of colours and shapes is highly idiosyncratic and happens over time (never as a discrete standalone moment), there’s no medium that’s even remotely close to being capable of reproducing the vast dynamic ranges of scene-referred light values at exposure time (and in case of JPEG or film photography, that data is never available in the first place). What can be conveyed is the tiny range reproducible by screens, film or ink on paper—and unless you take charge of scene data interpretation with your favourite raw processing software, the conversion to that range is a result of camera or film manufacturer’s design. …But even though there’s no true anchor, thinking your phone’s interpretation of reality is just that may be enough for this to be a self-fulfilling prophecy—after all, perception is a socio-psychological phenomenon. We may have used to have our own individual truths, but now it’s very common to believe that bland, sRGB-safe default capture interpretation by our camera or phone is the objective reality of what the world looks like (and anything else must be disclosed as “enhancement” or “processing”)—and it’s not easy for an individual to get rid of that notion if everyone around believes in it. Even the author of tweets like this runs with the same fallacy, and appears to showcase film and digital captures (and even 3D renders?) side by side, even while those are artifacts of drastically different ways of interpreting scene data.

drewcoo 4y ago
> All we had was words and paintings. If by "painting" you also mean things like lithographs[1] and magic lantern[2] shows and glazed ceramics and dyes used in textiles and rugs, then sure, all we had were words and paintings. I don't think most people would think of those when they thinking "paintings," though. And those are only the human-produced color anchors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithography [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern

ramesh31 4y ago

Just look at what happened to McDonalds. Some soulless corporate design committee full of MFAs and MBAs decided that being iconic and unique was too "corny", and remade their brand into empty grey nothingness. A perfect analogy to what has happened with web design as well.

hcarvalhoalves 4y ago

I've noticed, and absolutely hate that every furniture store or any new building today is basically white, grey and beige. I had to order my furniture custom-made because I wanted a blue sofa and yellow armchair and it's impossible to find, every furniture store used the same small variation of textiles. I believe this trend was primarily driven by economies of scale, and over time it turned into a customer preference by the offer vs. demand paradox.

aaron695 4y ago

sk0g 4y ago

I think one possible reason is colours have become more plentiful, so it's harder to match now. If there's 4 blues to pick from, you're likely to be able to deck out your entire kitchen in matching hues. If there's 50 blues... good luck.

lolsal 4y ago

Colors are trending towards the "may need to sell this kitchen/home/car/thing in the future, so I want to go with a non-offensive, maximally inclusive color for my potential buyers." If you paint your house hot pink, you're probably not concerned about resale value for a long while.

sosuke 4y ago
I feel you've got the thrust of it. I see our manufacturing and boom of middle class ownership starting off with wild color choices only to then find out that it makes resale harder. Every house resold in my neighborhood paints the brick house white. Also color fades more noticeably adding to upkeep cost. This is my two cents.
- corrral 4y ago
  People also move a lot more than they used to. That could be part of it. Who gives a shit if anyone else likes the kitchen color scheme that you love, if you're going to be in the house 20+ years? If you're only going to be in it 3-5 years, though....
pavon 4y ago
Even with that aspect, the consensus of what is considered neutral non-offensive household colors has changed from a warm brown palette (off-white walls, brown wood floor or tan carpet, wood or off-white cabinets) to a cool grey palette. That is a big shift. In the 90's or earlier painting a room grey would have been considered an opinionated decision that might turn off potential buyers.
- lolsal 4y ago
  It's true, trends evolve.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

The graph presented in the source doesn’t quite give it off, but my dad, an industrial designer and professor, always mentioned how innovations in plastic, materials and manufacturing in the 1960-1980’s made everyone in his field just crazy for all the new colors and shapes that were suddenly possible. I’m sure a lot of us can recall something similar in more recent niches like UI design. After a period of excitement with all the new possibilities comes a more sober minimalistic function-first approach. I don’t think this is something to lament - color has become cheap and widely available so it has lost the meaning it had in the 60’s and earlier. If anything, we could be talking about a brief color-heavy time period that is just ending. One in which everything became unreasonably colorful thanks to unrestrained consumption and petro-chemical innovations.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

Has the world become less colorful? Even if so, this isn't bad. There's something to be said for a world which doesn't use colors except functionally. * A red thing is red because it needs to be seen, like a STOP sign. * A grey thing is grey because there's no need for it to be not grey. I'm fine with either a creative colorful world or a functionally colorful world. Most of my stuff is grey. My glasses are purple, because it serves my interests right now for my face to be memorable. In an urban survival situation, say, I'd want the reverse: "be the grey man" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNWAgdQoaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcNWAgdQoaw)

squarefoot 4y ago

A lot more products are now built by machines, therefore saving on something like buying more different paint or less time "wasted" to reconfigure the production line makes sense from a business point of view. Thankfully, the real world (sun, mountains, lakes, my shirts) is still colorful as before.

HACKER501 4y ago

Sometimes people shame of what there wearing colors or something else but you chose what you want! So everyone can wear be what he wants to be/wear. Its crazy if you think about it people dont like colors because of colors everything is possible. Its just like gravity. HACKER501.

gnicholas 4y ago

Some car companies charge extra if you don’t want your vehicle in white/black/silver. I heard that Tesla charges $2k extra if you want a red Tesla. I think most are closer to $1k, which is still a pretty hefty charge for a purely aesthetic option.

kansface 4y ago

Quite a few just so stories in here - I mostly disagree with most in favor of my own: We shed our colors because we lost the emotions expressed by those colors in our lexicon. We don’t put joy, awe, wonder, or whimsy on display. Those emotions aren’t just gone from our palette (walls, furniture, consumer products, cars, fridges), they are non-existent in and of themselves in society at large. Our Art is outrage, performative or otherwise. News is outrage. Media is outrage. Popular culture is outrage. If you aren’t outraged yourself, you are part of the problem (needs more (out)rage). We will return to playful objects, playful colors and forms when it is once again permissible to express playfulness. We will return to joyous colors that express joy for joy’s sake when we have joy to express… see also the revival of mid-century modern as an implicit revival of the optimism of the 50s.

hallway_monitor 4y ago
This hits very close to home for some reason. Thinking about music, it seems that most emotions have gone from that art. Maybe this is why I enjoy stand-up comedy so much - I feel all four of those emotions when watching it.

MR4D 4y ago

Car colors certainly have gotten more bland: https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

mc32 4y ago

There was a time when color was expensive, dyes, paints, etc. Ford famously only wanted black cars… No. I think we’re living in a more colorful world because color is cheap.

v4dok 4y ago

I mainly wear grayscale and maybe some beige. I like grayscale cars and appliances. Why? Simply because it's easier on the eye. I grew up in a colour overload and I'm very glad things become more neutral. I'm able to appreciate colour much more when it's not everywhere all the time. Also, utility and convinience are much more increased with neutral colours. Clothes are easier to match, replace, wear again. Cars and appliances are easier to resell.

clove 4y ago

I lived in South Korea, and - I shit you not - if you look at the cars on the road 99% of them are either black, white, or gray.

ilaksh 4y ago

Amazing how most of the people in this thread are denying that trends exist or that they are influenced by them. The thing about fashion though is that it's subconscious. You would not know it affected you unless you are very meta-cognizant in this particular way. ( Which people should educate and train themselves about subtle cognitive biases.)

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

UK is far more colourful than North America

wink 4y ago

The wood examples are disingenuous I think. I'm close to 40 and everyone I know in my age group, where I grew up... their parents all had the same type of furniture with the same wood types. We all had the same colors in our kids' bedrooms. It was three types of local wood, and the odd outlier. Surprise! When we grew up we didn't want our apartments to look like our parents set them up in the 80s or 90s. My living room is (faux) dark cherry, my bedframe + nightstands are (painted) dark wood, my kitchen is light beige.