Category Archives: color

Set, follow or skip? How brands should navigate micro-trends

In 2023, clean girl, girl math, Barbiecore, coquette and tomato girl summer dominated our social feeds. This year, these trends have quickly been replaced by mob wife winter, corpcore and loud budgeting. That’s the thing about micro-trends: they’re fleeting.

In this sense, they’re not really micro-trends at all, argues trend forecaster Agustina Panzoni. “When you look at trends, you look at movements that span multiple years and multiple seasons on the micro-side,” she says. “So what has been labelled ‘micro-trends’ are more like ‘internet aesthetics’. They’re pre-packaged styles that you can buy into.”

https://www.voguebusiness.com/story/fashion/set-follow-or-skip-how-brands-should-navigate-micro-trends?status=verified

The Cultural Phenomenon Behind Pink, The Color That Sells

The color has been a crucial detail for films and television — from that scene in “Funny Face,” to Elle Woods sporting her iconic head-to-toe vibrant pink courtroom outfit in 2001′s “Legally Blonde,” to “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” where the shades of pink in costuming play a symbolic role in the final season. And, now, with the Greta Gerwig-helmed film’s release, the vividly hot “Barbie Pink” is inescapable.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-phenomenon-behind-pink-the-color-that-sells_n_64bc3dc5e4b0229eb565064d

The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants

The Bopeas are a new paradigm in culture and consumption. They are the descendants of other post-war consumer groups: the Hippies, the Yuppies, and the Bobos of Soho House. However, unlike their predecessors, who grew from the boom of generational upward mobility and urbanisation in the 80 years after the Second World War, the Bopeas are responding to something else: a crisis of what Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” — and a diminishing need for everyone to be an urban creative.

https://unherd.com/2023/07/the-dawn-of-the-bohemian-peasants/

WHAT IS ‘MILLENNIAL GRAY’ OR ‘CORPORATE GRAY’?

Urban Dictionary defines millennial gray as: “The sad depressive hue of the color gray which many millennials coat their life in. The color reflects how millennials went from non-sense happiness, looking at cartoon network and Nickelodeon in the 90’s to Inflation and depression in the early 2020s.”

https://www.intheknow.com/post/millennial-gray-corporate-gray-tiktok/

Lapis Lazuli and the History of ‘the Most Perfect’ Color

Ground lapis lazuli was increasingly used by painters during the 13th and 14th centuries to make ultramarine and Cennino Cennini gives instructions on how to prepare this pigment in his “Book of Arts.” But it was not until the second half of the 16th century that large objects carved from lapis began to appear in Italy. The first center of production was Milan where the Miseroni brothers, Gasparo and Girolamo, became famous for their mastery of working this challenging material. Half a dozen of the pieces acquired by Grand Duke Cosimo I Medici are on show here, including the “Cup in the Form of a Shell” referred to in a letter of 1563.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/arts/international/lapis-lazuli-and-the-history-of-the-most-perfect-color.html

Meet the People Who Decide What Design Trends Will Dominate Each Year

There is no crystal ball at the Pantone offices that allows the company to see into the future and glean enough insights to declare its annual Color of the Year. The team has something better: Leatrice Eiseman. As executive director of the Pantone Color Institute for almost 38 years and founder of the Eiseman Center for Color Information and Training, Eiseman’s job is to predict upcoming color and design trends alongside a highly skilled team of trend forecasters and colorists. “It’s not just a random choice made by a group of people sitting around,” Eiseman says. “It’s not fluff. We tune in and ask: What is it that’s driving the world around us? What’s the zeitgeist we’re feeling out there?”

https://www-dwell-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.dwell.com/amp/article/meet-the-people-who-decide-what-design-trends-will-dominate-each-year-97fc4a04

The hidden meanings behind fashion’s most dramatic colour

Through history, wearing black has signified power, rebellion, death, sex and more. Deborah Nicholls-Lee explores the inky depths of fashion’s most timeless colour – and how Cristóbal Balenciaga made it iconic.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221003-the-hidden-meanings-behind-fashions-most-dramatic-colour?

The colour is also a symbol of subversion. Subcultures such as rockers, punks and goths donned black to rebel against social conventions, playing their “youthful vivacity”, says Harvey, against sombre and sinister clothing choices. But popular culture also sees black associated with protest. When A-listers showed their support for the anti-sexual harassment movement Time’s Up at the Golden Globes in 2018, it was black they elected to wear.

How gray became the king of color

If you’ve spent any time on TikTok lately, you may have noticed a sudden obsession with color—or rather the absence of it. “There’s been a disappearance of color variety everywhere in the world,” one user says. “Now I’m insecure about liking neutrals,” another comments. It all stems from a 2020 blog post that claims color has been disappearing from the world. The researchers behind the post used computer vision to analyze the color pixels in 7,000 photographs of objects and how the color of these objects has evolved from the 1800s to 2020. These were sampled from five British museums and split across 21 categories, from electronics and lighting to household appliances.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90778314/how-gray-became-the-king-of-color

Building a more inclusive way to search

Detecting a skin tone in an image is a challenging problem, because it depends a lot on lighting, shadows, how prominent a face is, blurriness, and many other factors. The most accurate way to detect a skin tone in a Pin’s image would be to have a human label every single Pin image according to a scientific skin tone palette. But with billions of unique images, and many more created each day, that’s an expensive approach that would be hard to scale.

https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/building-a-more-inclusive-way-to-search-789f4c92fd73