Comment by xboxnolifes
2 days ago
> At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.
Based purely on intuition, I want to agree with you. However, the data in the article suggests there's been a fairly consistent decrease in color of media since the 1800s. You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease, but one does not exist. At least, the "explosion" the data shows is a very minor increase that does not affect the overall pattern.
The data in the article is either not representative or didn't go back far enough.
The best example, cars, only goes back to 1990. And the museum objects are objects a science museum happened to keep, that go back to 1800? Hardly representative of consumer objects in general. There isn't even a single chart about clothing.
Glancing through historical clothing and car magazines from the past century is going to tell you a lot more.
So do you have actual own data to counter this?
Will you settle for an anecdote? Before cars came in all colors, they were all black!
If you look closely, there's actually an increase of red, green, blue, etc. at the same time as the increase in black and white, and it's the brownish colors of undyed organic materials that are decreasing. (Or maybe they were originally dyed and the color faded over the last 200 years.)
Whereas before you might've been limited to a choice of lighter or darker wood for your furniture, now you can have it in any synthetic color you want, including pure black and pure white.
Yeah I'm pretty skeptical of that visualisation anyway. It sure looks like there's more grey scale, but that's because they've grouped it all at the top. If you actually look at the pixels in the below "white" a lot of them are very dark and unsaturated too.
I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
The data shows an explosion of "new" colours in the 1960s, although the trend never stopped. Technology is still no doubt the answer – including the explosion in the black to white spectrum. We aren't limited to natural colours or colours, period, like we once were.
The big difference between 1800s and the 1960s is that oil paints were mixed “onsite” for color and the the 1960s had the commcerialization of latex paints and Pantone colors.
I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.
Geocities were explosion of color.
Also, pop art.
> You would expect an explosion of color in the 1960s and then a decrease
What happened was a lot of muted colors, earthy yellows, browns, and oranges in the 70s followed by an insane amount of the brightest colors possible in the late 80s and early 90s where fluorescent blues greens and pinks were everywhere. It seems like everything got a lot more bland after that and we've never recovered to happy medium.