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
Category Archives: color
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.
Medieval colors.
The palette of natural, plant-sourced dyes.
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
Understanding the cultural meaning of colour
Dead Salmon and Elephant’s Breath: How a British paint maker’s oddball colors redefined luxury
In the aftermath of World War II, the West was upended by a do-it-yourself boom. IKEA was founded in 1943, with its first flat-pack furniture catalog released just a few years later. By 1954, Time magazine had dedicated its August cover story to the phenomenon, declaring DIY “the new billion-dollar hobby.”
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/farrow-and-ball-brand-history/index.html
The Blue story- A color which was ‘seen and named’ much later in the western world
The color blue has been an integral part of Indian civilization. The Indigo dying process dates back to the ancient Indus valley of Harappa. The mention of “blue gods” in Hinduism (Shiva, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama) indeed emphasizes the fact that blue had a significant presence in Indian culture for thousands of years. However, as Leo Shvedsky wrote in the article at Good.is, ancient civilizations had no word for the color blue. It was the last color to appear in many languages, including Greek, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew. Read more
Where the 1960s “psychedelic” look came from
The story behind the color of your couch, and everything else you own
Analyzing Trends with Tim Stock 