"Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class."
I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
That's just upmarket-priced vendors using influencers to advertise.
You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.
You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
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.
But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
I don't think anyone would argue the point of cars is to look pretty or make the environment more balanced. Cars are successful in spite of looking like shit and damaging the environment.
the history of cars in the US is pretty complicated tbh. most major cities had street cars and rail systems for a long time before major government initiatives ripped them out in favor of highways and streets. I'm not sure cars would be as popular without that major push towards car-centric infrastructure.
This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
Pretty much every retail store is like this. I mean, it's been this way for a while, but there is so much loud colorful advertizing that having a quiet place to live in feels much better.
Love the phrasing. I found myself in the past few days getting in a pair of disputes in HN comments that may have boiled down reading the exaggerated adjectives literally, when the authors may not have intended that.
> If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
Why is Taco Bell slowly losing color like a vampire is draining it of fun and blood? I see these driving around and I just shake my head, what about light purple and white represents Mexican culture and food? It's the whitest thing they could do without making the sign all white. Same thing with Target. Now some of the logos are white on white!
The example they use of Baroque art actually perfectly demonstrates this. It primarily consists of neutral tones that integrate well with the blues and muted oranges woven through it. Not exactly riotous color, as they put it - but very similar to the use of color you see both in modern designs and older cultural traditions.
(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.
Isn't all that art faded out, though? I wouldn't be surprised if Baroque period art was originally painted with riotous color first and then faded over time to where it now looks merely like an "opinionated use of color".
In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.
I just searched for some colorised Roman statues and they don't seem to be overusing color. Even complex designs might be basically three colors (e.g. red, blue and white, plus with brown hair and eyes), and the colors themselves are a bit muted. I guess the have been painted based on modern interpretations of the original colors based on whatever limited evidence remains, so maybe those aren't the original colors, but it doesn't seem like a 1990s era website or a garish collection of first gen iMacs and iBooks.
Well, visually exhausting is something that imho happens only if you find unpleasant the colors you're seeing. The wonderful island of Burano is something I would never get tired of, yet it's so colorful.
I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that catch - and drain - our attention
I don't hate the wall art in your example... it's not quite my taste, but it doesn't make me pull my hair out. If you look at something like the link below, I'd hate having to be anywhere near it. Busy patterns and mixes of color just feel like noise and give me (sometimes literally) a headache.
Yes and, part of it is advertising visually tormenting us. They throw uber catchy colorful banners of stuff we're often not interested in the slightest, doing everything to get our attention. Also, websites featuring advertisement are encouraged to have more muted tones so they stand out. That gets tiresome and we tend to want rest for private spaces.
But overall I agree. If everything is uber-colorful, that can become just overwhelming. Also we are a lot more stimulated throughout the day with screen and movies and games. In the olden days you didn't have a smartphone with a colorful screen, so putting lots of colour in your house or your church made more sense.
I'd want less advertisement, and more thoughtful color choices throughout cities and digital spaces.
You can see the same thing in music recordings during the 60s. Stereo and quadrophonic sound was new so everything was panned all over the place really hard. Drums all on the left, vocals hard right etc. It's an interesting effect sometimes, but generally a gimmick and/or distraction. We don't really do that anymore, for good reason.
I've heard this is a recommended paradigm for mixing, to only ever pan things R, C, L and nothing in between, but it doesn't make sense to me. Possible because i have to mix on headphones, but it sounds much too extreme to me. Sure, _some things_ can go all the way but i generally enjoy to fill the space between the far edges, and allow some reverb busses to blur the lines a bit if needed.
Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down
That’s totally not true. The original stereo patent from the 1930s is based on M+S signals, not separate channels, and was born out of a desire to position sound across a stage (movies).
By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.
IIRC, the Beatles “Sgt. Pepper” album was among the first stereo-mixed albums released. As much fame as that particular album has, the original mix is really bad. Drums all left, guitars all right, nothing in the center. It sounds weird to modern ears!
Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.
One of the reasons being that more people had mono systems so the stereo mixdown was just kind of a "for fun" afterthought. They didn't take it as seriously.
Even worse is when they keep screwing with the panning. I can't stand Led Zeppelin II for that reason. Someone just couldn't stop messing with the damn slider, right in the middle of songs. The ones with merely bad, but static, panning are far more tolerable.
I don't think we stopped doing it because it's gimmicky.
Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.
Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.
So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.
> I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
could a factor driving current monotone style be less about aesthetics and taste and more that we're all just cognitively exhausted?
everything is fighting for our attention because our attention has been monetized. so when something bland shows up, it simultaneously provides a bit of respite and can seem more 'trustworthy' because it isn't clamoring for your attention.
if i were buying some kitchen appliances and i had a choice between a brightly colored models or a stark, utilitarian models, i have to admit that the stark ones have appeal because they "look professional" (even though it may not actually be pro quality) and "the color is just a sales gimmick" (even though boring industrial grey is also a sales gimmick)
If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
> If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
My impression from the data is not that greyscale now dominates the physical environment, but that browns once dominated. Presumably because things like wood, copper, etc. once dominated the materials we engrossed ourselves in. As we've expanded the paints and other materials we live with, we've found much more balance.
Is that really true or isiit just that blues and greens biodegrade and so the only evidence of the past's colors we have is the mineral colors. We have evidence that paint has been used on wood furniture - but not what color was used.
I think the sensory load idea is productive, but I'd add a related idea of drawing attention to key things only.
I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.
But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.
Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.
When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.
(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)
I have a different take on interior wall colors: any shade too far off from white actually darkens the room no matter the color.
Paint colors subtractively from light: you never get more light into a room when you're knocking out wavelengths rather then reflecting them. Whereas with whiter walls you always have the option of manipulating color by using colored lighting.
Whatever colour you put on the wall at home, you get used to. Your senses acclimatize to it because you see it all the time, even if it initially seemed "riotous".
Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.
Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
Even if it's in one's own living space it's possible to not get used to something. In those cases, for those types of personalities, it'll usually get replaced or painted over. One thing I completely abhor are busy tile patterns, it can be the shapes or colors, and no, I wouldn't get used to it.
In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.
Then what happens, if you're that type of person, after you've replaced or painted over something? Do you relax and become comfortable with what's left? Or do you move on to the next irritant, that will bug you until you've replaced or painted over that?
I saw some pictures from a house where everything was white. The walls were white, the tables and chairs were white, the pillows were white, lamps were white, etc. But I bet the owner didn't see it as everything being white, like I did. I bet that when they'd look at the same pictures, they'd see all the little details here and there that were not white, or not quite white enough. I imagine them being in a constant state of stress over the non-white blemishes.
I don't know them, I just saw the pictures, so I don't truly know how they feel, I could be just imagining things. But my gut feeling is that someone with a home like that is not at ease with themselves.
For your example, probably. Different people will have different compulsive behaviors. I painted my kitchen cabinets shortly after moving in... I didn't do the best job of it, and I do notice the blemishes, inconsistencies and bleed through as well as a few spots that chipped over the last 6 years or so. Not enough that I stress over it, or even really think about it in general, but recognize.
I don't think I'd ever want something all that monochrome for myself. To me, subdued isn't about monochrome so much as limiting the noise. I don't even mind a sharp contrast, such as a colorful photo/painting. It's what I can only describe as visual noise that gets me. Especially with patterns that aren't really something you'd see in nature.
> But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
This is meaningless.
"When many things are different, everything is the same".
Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing.
"000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because in the second sequence they're different and in the first they're all the same? Great, you just discovered sets and the axiom of choice.
We are literally discussing the difference within the sets! Obviously the second sequence is more diverse.
First, I thought your argument was going somewhere but then it took this turn.
I would agree with the first part and then argue that before the synthetics-revolution things were mostly just shades of browns(which is a type of dark unsaturated orange). Except for the upper classes who could afford the expensive colors. Now that color is cheap and normalized, it lost (some) of its allure. Not being able to signal your wealth anymore.
Now adding just a conjecture of mine; Now that 'clean' is still somewhat more expensive(upper classes still being able to afford more cleanliness by using other peoples labor), minimal textures(not literal textures but design-wise) are more attractive because it displays your wealth. Plain-white being the easiest to see blemishes on. With black being easier look unblemished. Also, 'tasteful' color arrangements will still signal your class somewhat due to requiring cultural knowledge.
I would describe it more as noise... When there are loud, clashing color patterns everywhere, it all turns into noise and nothing really stands out. It's like watching analog TV with poor reception... there's stuff there, but really hard to make out or focus.
I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.
Modern SCADA systems are designed like this too. They used to be a riot of programmer art in primary colours, with most things blinking at any one time. Now they’re grey-on-grey for anything “nominal” with alarms in orange or red. Far less migraine inducing and far easier to see the important things.
I'm going to change your first example. Can you see what stands out?
"00000000qq000000000I0000000"
Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?
"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"
Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.
But you're contrasting chaotic use of many different colors with neutrality, and arguing for environments with very little color rather than well-coordinated color; you argued above that color was just one element along with size, shape, texture etc., as if these qualities were mutually exclusive and design should only emphasize one at any given time.
Well yes, in practice color often is chaotic. Nobody is color-coordinating the cars in the road, or the houses on a street, or the signs and advertisements and billboards. It's a free-for-all that turns into garish noise.
And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
I have had full-color painted rooms in one home or another for >20 years and have yet to get tired of it. I like having the color saturation turned up high. You have your taste, but it's not objectively correct in any way.
> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents.
Yes, there's no such thing as "objectively correct" when it comes to design. But it's where Western society currently is in terms of the design of public spaces including offices, how your realtor will advise you to redecorate when putting your home for sale, etc. And there are principles of modern design that, while not judgeable as correct/incorrect, are widely accepted as established.
So that's great you like to be bombarded with color, but I'm talking about an explanation for where society has been and how it's evolved with regard to color.
Sure you can. Red rose in a field of green for example. Human eyes evolved to see the colours the way they do precisely because they were working in a world where nearly everything is colourful and some things needed to stand out.
Have you looked at a field recently? Spot the flowers: https://wallpapercave.com/field-of-flowers-wallpaper - I'm not sure what you call colourful; but I call those colourful. The flowers are still hard to miss. The colour makes them more obvious.
If you want a more academic source; try https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/courses/120/Lectures/... slides 13 & 14. Colour isn't some random distraction, the human vision system uses it to help decide what to focus on. Then you get things like peacocks where they go all in on using colourful visualisations to attract attention.
I seriously don't know what you meant by the following:
> When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
My example is clearly a colorful painting, very vibrant, yet certain tones stand out. What you said is literally wrong. It's neither simple nor obvious. Spell out what you meant. Your counter example isn't obvious either.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone."
What a load of crap. Where do you live, in a cave? have you ever been in a jungle perhaps? what about birds with colorful feathers? you want to wash out those colors too? jesus, nature dictates and nature is full of vivid colors. so your argument goes down the drain.
there is no such thing as modern taste. there are trends dictated by a handful of psychotic gatekeepers who got hooked on their own farts.
old movies had the absolute best coloring. compare those movies to the ones seen now and you are on the verge of retching. these superficial, devoid of human value superprocessed heaps of shit they try to force feed to people, just plain unwatchable. not just the story lacks, it has zero message, nothing to chew on, just some brainwashing action scenes. that's good for the plebs they say while squeezing people for money.
absolutely reprehensible, that a handful of gatekeepers put people into these literal psycho gardens that is devoid of anything resembling human. what's missing is the human part. the humanity is slowly missing from everything.
Jungles are actually a great example. They are mostly neutral browns and dark greens that form a pretty neutral background... with the occasional beautiful bright accent colors from a bird or flower or something. But if you trek through the jungle, it's pretty boring color-wise most of the time. Which is why spotting a colorful bird is such a joy.
But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.
> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth.
I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.
This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).
The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama, and then also a serious technical problem involving HDR device-side (which is a whole other story).
But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.
However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.
Right. For a long time I wondered what's going on, and eventually started believing it's my fault - that maybe I'm just a rare HDR-poor person watching TV shows on SDR computer displays, maybe I've hit an unusual corner case in the video decoding path, or something. I kept believing that until Star Trek: Picard, Season 3, which made it clear it's not me, it's them.
The whole show, like everything in the past decade or so, was dark and washed out (except for some space FX parts, where at least some colors were saturated, sometimes). This lasted up until the last two episodes, where for plot reasons[0], some protagonists found themselves onboard a ship from TNG-era shows (1980s - 2000s), pulled straight from a museum, which means the set was recreated as it was on old shows, complete with the lighting. From that scene onwards through the final episode, as it jumped between that one special set and every other dark and gray scene, I had proof in front of me that scenes in modern shows can be properly lit, they just aren't, and it's an active choice[1].
Importantly, this scene wasn't a one-off gimmick that risked coming out too bright on normal people's HDR-enabled TV screens. The set involved was, per the showrunner, pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the entire season, and they burned most of the season's budget on perfecting it[2]. Them being able to light it well (and have it coexist with every other badly-lit scene) only proves there's no technical obstacle involved - that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
--
[0] - Hard to navigate around a major spoiler and highlight of the era in the franchise.
[1] - Actually, I can't give this scene enough justice. But given how massive moment that was for people following the franchise, I'll just provide a link to the video (SPOILER WARNING): https://youtu.be/t-mY4Xbjyn8?t=42 -- watch in max quality; compare okay-ish exterior CG early on, observe how dark and washed out scenes with people are - and this is literally how the entire season (and really, entire show) was until that point... or just scroll to 2:27, and then on a perfect cue - "computer, lights!" - observe how next 30 seconds reveal that everything could've been properly lit from the start, but for some non-tech reason, it wasn't.
[2] - Most of that was eaten up by casting very specific people, but the set itself was damn expensive too.
> that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.
Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.
But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.
TNG was lit much like other action/adventure shows when it debuted in 1987, e.g. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, The A-Team (which ended that spring) -- the Bridge and hallways were much brighter than even a sitcom, I'd bet as a specific aesthetic choice of The Future Is Bright.
When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".
Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)
I guess you can justify it by saying starship lightning design has changed over the years hehe. Look at all this bright light fixtures on the bridge of the older ship!
That, and the carpets, yes :). But it still is a solid proof that dark scenes are just a choice - not a limitation of the medium or shooting technique.
> It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge".
It is. The article you link even begins:
> So many TV shows and movies now
That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.
You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.
It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
> The article you link even begins: "So many TV shows and movies now"
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
> Yes, the type of drama does include the range you're describing
When your "certain type of drama" covers every genre under the sun, and you pretend that Dexter and Justice League are somehow the dame type of genre, excuse me for bot taking your words seriously.
> I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case.
Whatever comes across my radar.
BTW it's also quite telling how in your classification there's "certain type of drama" (90% of genres apparently) that is susceptible to the sludge, and then comedies and reality shows (the only two you could come up with that are not. Even though comedies, especially movies, are often just as drab and gray as every other genre)
I don't know what to tell you. I don't know if you're intentionally trying to misunderstand me or what.
I never said "genre". I said "type of drama". There are probably a hundred subgenres of drama, yes including both Dexter and Justice League. There isn't some clean perfect distinction for which directors choose go use the dark look and which don't. I'm lumping the ones that go dark into a "type". I've got to use some word to group them.
Also, what do you mean "the only two you could come up with that are not"? There are fundamentally three types of entertainment TV: comedy, reality, and drama. Only one of them adopts the dark look commonly, in some of its content.
And you're just flat-out wrong about comedies being "often just as drab and gray as every other genre". That's just... wrong. I don't know what else to tell you.
> The drained-color thing is exclusive to a certain type of TV/movie drama
You're absolutely wrong, it happened to video games too. The industry defended it by saying it made games look more "realistic", but have since backed off after consumers revolted and dubbed the aesthetic "piss filter."
Started in the mid 00s, went strong for about a decade and still persists to a lesser degree today. Only designers like it, consumers broadly hate it.
Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.
It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.
Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.
According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.
The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen differen...
But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable.
They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras.
We didn't "forget" how to "make movies look like movies". We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom. And like always, people will disagree over aesthetic choices.
I totally understand what you mean, though, about lighting vs grading, and where what gets done, but there are good arguments for doing more with grading rather than in the lighting. It ultimately allows the editor+grader+director to make a lot more choices, and that's generally a good thing. You say "color grading in post should be for small tweaks" but I respectfully disagree. And obviously, there isn't even a choice when it comes to the outdoors in daytime -- it has to be done in the grading.
I broadly agree with what you're saying. In my post, I was specifically addressing cases where a lack of expressive diversity in looks is a result of the factors discussed - basically the failure mode where color grading becomes a crutch instead of one part of an intentionally crafted look. In non-failure cases, color grading can be fantastically expressive and a key element in the cinematographer's toolbox.
As I mentioned, the problem is a strange lack of visual diversity in looks. I'm all for increasing artistic and expressive range and I'm not one of those pining for old-school processes. As you said, film had and still has a lot of limitations. Having been involved in both pre-digital film production and analog video production, we had to spend stupid amounts of effort to avoid or overcome the inherent technical limitations we were saddled with. It was incredibly frustrating and I'd spend time dreaming about a future where those technical (and chemical) limitations no longer haunted us. I guess that's why I'm sort of dismayed that so many creators aren't utilizing the truly incredible technical fidelity even consumer gear provides today.
I should also have mentioned I don't fully agree with every point made in the video I linked but it is a terrific way to highlight that the issue isn't technical limitations of digital production. It's either an explicit creative choice to settle for visual blandness or the result of not making explicit choices leading to an ambient default sameness.
> We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom.
That's what I find delightful about today's best work. And I'm fine respecting different creative choices, as long as someone actually thought about it and made those choices intentionally because they believed it was the best realization of their unique vision. But it's also true that the range of looks in today's content isn't as wide as it should be. There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project. Or the recent epidemic of 'HDR-flat' desaturation. We can and should strive to do better - to think and create different and deploy the full palette of expression we're so fortunate to finally have at our fingertips. I want to see and celebrate a broad range of expressively unique, creatively opinionated looks - even ones I don't personally care for - whether created in-camera, in grading or even purely in CGI.
I should also add that there's still an element of technical limitation driving some of this default to visual conservatism. Sadly, inconsistent (and sometimes just broken) HDR implementations across consumer viewing platforms is a frustrating issue and I sympathize with colorists and mastering engineers prepping content for literally 200 different distribution formats. While technically-based, these issues are all the more tragic because there's no underlying reason it had to be such a shit show of uneven implementation. HDR, wide color gamuts and deep color spaces are all well-specified and purely in the digital domain. High-quality digital processing and conversion is inexpensive and built into even cheap HDMI encoder chips so even the cheapest consumer displays with limited capabilities should be able to map content created with higher color spaces and wide dynamic ranges so that they still broadly represent the creator's intent. Yet too many still fail to properly handle mapping HDR and WCG content.
> There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project.
Ha! Indeed. Yup, agreed on all points you've made.
Besides the obvious factors of time and budget, I think it's precisely the technical freedom we have that a lot of people simply don't know how to use. If we have 100x the visual possibilities now, it might also be fair to say that it requires 10x training to be able to use them well. I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
> I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
Agreed. Great creatives are still great (and still too rare). In addition to the lack of technical proficiency and creative aspiration, I also suspect there's an element of some directors/DPs on VFX blockbusters assuming all the sensational VFX elements in the frame simply overwhelm beautifully subtle, artistically expressive in-camera cinematography or maybe make it matter less. I can't really fault them for assuming that as it's sometimes at least somewhat true (for some viewers). But then I look at an extraordinary outlier example of VFX-soaked comic book movie lensed brilliantly like The Batman compared to a typically competent example like recent live action Spiderman and realize... nope, it still matters - it's just really hard to do well and integrate with VFX. (Some good comparison examples in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STynLl-2FqU).
There's definitely a cultural component to "modern taste". South Asian cultures have a preference for warm tones and many vibrant colors. East Asian cultures from developing and developed countries these days have lots of cool tones and monotone aesthetics. While I found the article a bit short on the "why", I do agree that the West has had a philosophical disdain for color from the Industrial era.
No thank you. I prefer rich colors, they consistently make world look a more lively place, the more the better. There is some getting used to of course, but it doesn't normalize at the same bottom that sea of grey/white/black is.
I hate this with passion with cars - sea of grey in western Europe. Heck, both of our cars are grey - we always buy used ones and there was simply no other option that wasn't 10k more expensive for params we wanted and were willing to pay. It looks bland, boring, unimaginative. One of top reasons why buy new - one can actually choose something nicer.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over India and boy do they use crazy intense colors all over and everywhere including clothing - orange, purple, pink, very bright, both men and women. A very, very nice visual experience one doesn't get used to. Then coming back to western civilization where literally everybody dresses in black or dark grey during winter. Its just sad view, like winter with low amount of sunlight isn't depressing enough, no lets add some more monotonous colors.
As an Indian living in a western European country - I very much prefer the gray/ neutral colors here. I always found the excessive and ugly use of color in India overwhelming. Though, I agree, a bit of more colors in winter wear would be nice.
Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.
> Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I disagree. The 60s through the 80s had a wide color palette with extremely good design. Early 1900s too. Heck even the Greek statues were extremely colorful.
I mean... ish? There is something to be said for a minimal styling, but there is clearly an aesthetic change to things. As an easy example, wallpaper used to be far more common, and was often far more busy than the neutral colors people insist on in homes nowadays. Not just more colorful, but with designs on them.
You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.
I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
That misrepresents Technicolor. The 3-film process was adopted in the 1930s. It was the most popular, but not first, incarnation of Technicolor.
Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.
The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."
Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
Fuck modern taste. I have a bedroom where the walls and bedding are deep blue and it's accented with neutral colors. There's another room which is a rich shade of purple. Doing without bold use of color isn't tasteful, it's just boring.
You're right, modern design often favors neutral bases with pops of color.
However, if everyone followed that same "modern taste," everything would look alike. Just as the technicolor era had its appeal, so do bold color palettes.
The best approach depends on the desired effect and overall design.
I think technology certainly had an effect. I remember pre-2008, the design trends were mostly centered around pushing the boundaries in terms of software capabilities. For example shiny/translucent 'pill buttons' became insanely popular as image editors became good at creating rounded corners and gradients with alpha transparency and layering them... Then eventually the trend became minimalist with a focus on simpler shapes and colors and larger fonts to make interfaces look less cluttered.
I think the duller colors we see nowadays has something to do with the ongoing minimalism trend. Minimalism is seen as professional-looking. Unfortunately, now we have the problem that brands struggle to differentiate themselves because any overly creative design risks coming across as 'unprofessional'. The balance of 'appearing unique' and 'appearing professional' has shifted towards the latter.
In a broader sense, it reflects society's shift towards increased centralization and conformity and an intolerance towards outliers.
When I was a kid Santa Cruz's Highway 1 had all these bushes with flowers, and lots of ice plant. It's now asphaul, concrete, road debris. The flowers were never distracting and I actually much preferred the drive in the past. When I go back today it's just grey and dreary, not 'focus enabling'.
I would argue that the main reason is because everything is about money, and the shorter marketability of everything. Colors are polarising, and affect the unsold inventory and perceived resale value.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
In fact, there is demand for colorful products. However, the way businesses measure demand today is through the aggregate unit demand. In effect, you get the lowest common denominator products rising to the top, and people with specific preferences can't get at their desired products. If instead, businesses would measure demand at a more granular level, they'd see this and be able to better serve their customers.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
A long time ago I worked at a children's toy store and among other things I was responsible for ordering and restocking the bins full of small loose toys that cost under a buck or two.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
awesome insight. i've heard this referred to as the "site merchandising" problem. There are some products that are there to attract people / give them a choice, but they don't sell themselves.
Reminiscent of halo cars in the automotive industry. Fancy flagship vehicles produced to show off the brand and bring attention (to their other vehicles), but not necessarily to become profit makers themselves.
Yeah, my theory was that the yellow ones caught people's eye since it stood out from the visual clutter, but yellow isn't anyone's favorite color, so you end up buying blue or red...
As someone who's own{s|ed} 2 yellow cars (A Mercedes SLK230 and a Mustang MachE) This makes me sad. I've also owned 3 red cars and one blue one so my color choices aren't exactly in line with the sales data.
Cafes use it too. E.g. a corner coffee shop may stock pastries that nobody buys. When people walk in "wow look at all their pastries!" And they feel good and become regulars.
I think it goes one layer further, everyone is worried that everyone else is worried that colors don't sell. "I like this used bright pink Honda, but I'm worried no one else will buy it if I want to sell so I'm not going to buy it"
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
Cars are not buy it for life items. I generally buy a 3 year old car because it is about half the price of a new one - but I'm limited to what color I can find. If I bought new cars I could get whatever color - except that new car buyers won't be seen in a 4 year old car, and they can only afford to upgrade (to the extent they can) if the car has resale value so they care about what color they (the dealer) thinks will sell.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
If you buy new and drive for live you are a minority and so manufacturers (and banks via loans) won't make that type of thing that sell you but don't have perceived resale. If you buy newish used and keep for life you are stuck with what they think you will buy.
I'm on my 16th year with my Jetta, bought new. For appearances I should probably buy a new car (it's totaled), but I'm pretty sure it will last another 16 years and will only be replaced out of necessity (were I to have a family) or vanity (were I to have a midlife crisis). I've worked from home or commuted by bicycle most of the time I've owned it so I've averaged < 8,000 miles per year.
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
Yup. I think it’s terrible the author brought up adolf loos, an architect from the early 1900s, showed a building I don’t think he made, and then blamed him for dull modern apartment buildings. If you look up his buildings, they’re actually pretty cool and weird; he was an artist responding to his time. Modern apartment buildings are developed by people with inordinate wealth who don’t care about the asthetic beauty surrounding those peons who pay them rent. The priority is beauty that impresses on the first viewing to trick renters. Every other incentive is to save money, and art is one of the first things to go when people start trying to be perfectly efficient. That’s the same sort of issue with music, desperation that precludes a focus on pure art.
I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.
Gen Z is rejecting this "millennial bland" aesthetic of turning all spaces into an Apple store. Just one reason I appreciate and look forward to the coming generation. Take a look at some of their trends in art, music, fashion, graphic design... plenty of color to be found.
When computers were beige, they went all in on color to stand out. When everything started being more colorful, they moved to white and then grey/silver. Now that everything is grey/silver, they're moving to gold/rose.
I've heard that before. Supposedly gen X (which I'm a part of) was rejecting the bland colors of their baby boomer parents back when we were in our 20s. I don't know what happened.
As an elder millennial, words cannot express how much I despise "Millennial Gray." When I was househunting for my current house, it was depressing how much was out there, because a brand-new gray kitchen, bath, or floor is an absolute dealbreaker for me. Paint I can paint over, but yuck.
I specifically bought a "millennial gray" apartment and put bland furniture: it's mostly white, black, and brown. The twist is that I'm putting colorful decorations, so that when you enter my living room, your eyes ignore all the "functional" items, and focus on decorative items, because these are colorful. It's like those video games where environment is grey but interactive objects are lit.
Only the living room has any colors. Bedroom and bathroom are as boring as can be, so that you do your shit, don't get distracted, and get back to the living room.
I’ve certainly noticed this in film and interior design (most AirBnBs will have a familiar grayscale palette), but the opposite trend has occurred in software. Windows 2000 was far less colorful than Windows 10, which in turn had a more saturated palette than Vista and Windows 7.
And Windows 11 is significantly less colourful again. Also, you're missing out the most colourful version of all - Windows XP!
(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
Wild. Because that is one of the first, most heavily color graded films I can recall. Theoden's coming out from under the spell of Saruman is the most hit-you-ver-the-head use of color-grading that I can think of. (And, perhaps in a fantasy film it's fine.)
Last night I watched Erin Brokovitch (2000) and it was like looking at film that had been partially sepia-processed with the heavy handedness of the grading.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
The Matrix also had a technical reason/glitch that pushed them earlier in the process to pursue the narrative reason. (Per some of the commentary, the early effects work they were doing, such as processing the first versions of "bullet time", were very susceptible to green/blue screen leakage so they leaned into that, and used it to decide which shots should use green or blue screens and let that leakage drive other parts of the color grading, including introduce "fake" color leaks onto set work that didn't use chroma keying [green/blue screens].)
Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.
In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
It's fun watching Marvel's catalogue from start to current. They really went all-in early on, then the mode-du-jour changed and it's almost obvious how hard they avoid it (a lot of red and green lights for example). Interfaces, weaponry and engines are always egregious in that franchise.
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
I enjoyed Midsommar's overuse of orange/teal because it really led to the feeling that the viewer was on a psychedelic trip (which usually comes with oversaturating of reds and orange.) Agree that Marvel is doing a lot of trend chasing in its color grading.
I think the Marvel example is interesting as much because it doesn't seem to just be trend chasing, but also one axis to view Marvel's internal struggles between homogeneity and experimentation/directorial control/capturing the joy of the art of the comics themselves. You can almost directly tell if it was a year that Marvel studio choices were more dominant or if the film's director and editor had more control that year based on the color grading alone.
> I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars
This. If you look at the cars, pretty much the only "stock" bright color is red. I used to drive a grass green car (vinyl wrap), and it stood out everywhere.
I wish car makers offered more color options by default.
Almost all car makers offer bright colours by default. In my driveway is a bright blue Subaru (it was hard to pick between the blue and eye-searing orange) and a bright copper coloured Suzuki. Mazda is becoming famous for their innovative colour options. Google "Nissan Micra colours" to see what even Japan's most conservative carmaker offers to those who care to look.
On selected models only :( E.g. Ford doesn't offer anything brighter than muted red on their Escape vehicles. They do have brightly-colored Mustangs, but nothing else.
Even Mazda doesn't offer them for all their vehicles.
BMW offers hundreds of colors, as do (I assume) most vendors. It’s not that they aren’t offered, so much as salesmen are simply pushing everyone towards black/white/gray because those colors are least likely to turn off a consumer. Can’t find red? Well black is very common and also looks mean!
Still, I think we’re seeing a LOT more color. From the cool khaki blue Subaru color that was so popular, to the M2 BMW in baby blue, to the Audi e-tron in purple, to the corvettes and mustangs that I rarely see in monochromatic colors.
> Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though
Apple really drops the ball on colors in 99% of their products. You have the iMac and.... oh wait, that's it. There are no real colors on the pro phones and even the non-pro phones looks like something that got 1 of 10 coats of color. And then the MBPs have a handful of shades of gray, I would totally buy a green or blue MBP if there was one.
Another thing that might also play a role is this styling trend of vehicles looking "meaner" and more and more aggressive. This was discussed[1] a bit on HN a while ago. Bright colors don't really match the "My vehicle is going to punch you in the face" styling (for cars and especially trucks) that has become popular.
Literally every vehicle seems to have that diagonal line incorporated somewhere. I mean the one generally near the windows that slopes downward as it moves towards the front of the car, regardless of the general shape of the car itself.
Not sure which diagonal line you mean but I expect some creases are added for structural reasons, so the large areas of the metal are rigid, not floppy.
Just do an image search for the word "sedan" or pay attention in traffic. It's an exterior panel so I don't think it can be very much structural. Maybe aerodynamics though.
Once you see it you can't unsee it and it starts to look very ugly very fast.
I assume you mean the line near the handles on this Corolla [1]? That whole part of the car is doing a lot of different things.
1. Flat vertical panels are a no-no. Adding creases increases buckling resistance.
2. That's a hugely important area for cabin noise because the side mirrors cause turbulence and the vehicle body needs a channel to constrain the turbulent flow and flex as little as possible near the door seals.
3. The skin needs to expand outwards from the line of the pillars to fit the window mechanisms, the handles/locks, and the side impact protection without intruding into the cabin space.
4. It makes the car look more sporty and interesting. The technical term for the crease itself is "character line", and it's the main reason why the Corolla has one. It's visual reinforcement for the modern standard combo of low hoods-high trunks that's considered attractive styling.
5. The greenhouse (cabin) narrows towards the top for rollover safety and aerodynamic reasons (a.k.a tumblehome), and this needs to blend with the rest of the body in a visually appealing way. The cybertruck is a good example of how unusual it can look if this is just a straight line on the body. Here's a comparison between the current design and an ai-generated "rounded" design [2] [3].
I'd say farm equipment has embraced the same "meaner" trend, but has also doubled down on bright, vibrant colours.
Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still.
That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this year and gone the next, so if you have one of those no-longer-available colours it sticks out like a sore thumb as looking old. Which is what I believe the consumer truly fears – owning a car that looks old and dated.
The blacks and whites have remained consistently available, so it is far less risky.
Farm and construction equipment the colors are dominated by brand. Team Green Equipment versus Team Red Equipment versus Team Yellow Equipment versus Team Orange Equipment, pick your side. Each side is effectively monochromatic within whatever their brand tolerance is for their brand's color. John Deere's green is a very specific single Pantone shade and has stuck to it consistently as long as color standards have allowed them to be that consistent.
From a buyer's perspective there's still a choice of color if you have no allegiance to brand, but the monochromatic tribalism of each brand (and their loyalists) is strangely fascinating.
Case in point. The last of the ACGO tractors in orange now look old and dated even though the otherwise _identical_[1] Massey Ferguson tractors from the same era still look relatively modern.
[1] Technically they had different engines, but that isn't visible anyway.
Something I found myself paying attention to as I was getting tired of cars and looking towards training for a motorcycle is what colors stand out, not just high-visibility clothes but the vehicle too because you want to be seen. Once you've tuned your eyes into looking it's shocking how many riders are pure black when they're more vulnerable on the roads. It's an interesting exercise when you're walking around a city onto a new street with cars parked up to see how quickly you can count how many there are, I found it can be difficult to separate out cars with how common black is now, and the less common brighter colors really stand out.
> Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by.
Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed or something. Recall that the 90s were still pretty colorful in regards to clothing here in the US. And then just a couple of years later people here were all starting to wear those greys, charcoals and black.
Offtopic, but did you look into painting options? It's often cheaper to buy a better car and just repaint it.
My friend have a lime car (with some original color saved for the accents) because they did that. You mentioned the colour specifically and I remembered that it wasn't that pricey
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
> Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time
This is driven in part by a shift towards mobile screens and the compression in visual space. Even on the desktop the favicon has an influence with this deconstruction.
> it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time.
Because buying anything not in the standard white/black/corporate gray is easily an extra thousand euros on top of the car price. Red is still sometimes offered as standard color.
Colors aren’t cool. You know what’s cool? Clean perfect lines, rich texture and materials. Imagine a cube of polished concrete stone, with a wood plank sanded and stained to a warm perfection, basking in the glow of a square window at a perfect 45 degree angle. Beautiful, it can move you to tears.
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
> The underlying theory in all of these cases is that while color is sensory, unstable, and chaotic, form is rational, stable, and pure.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
I get this feeling when I visit certain places with beton brute architecture, and I always wonder what kind of suffering did the architect go through to design something like that?
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works."
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
> the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
Maybe not “the Greeks” broadly, but Spartans specifically are equated with austerity to the extent that “spartan” is adopted as an adjective meaning “showing indifference to comfort and luxury”.
I think you really start to see the fetishization of the Greeks and Romans in the Neoclassicism movements in the 18th century as an aesthetic, and I'm actually not sure how much was known about the actual Greek and Roman lifestyles (Roman, in particular - a big lot of this is tied up with the notions of Empire) at the time.
With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
The loss of color is concerning, but something I find interesting is the image the author chooses to illustrate Loos' quote, "We have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." I would argue the building pictured falls short of this goal in important ways. A lot of contemporary architecture lacks the modernist commitment to flat planes, pure volumes, etc. and adds lazy and useless decorative/textural elements. The building pictured would look better if it was less adorned! (But even better with some color)
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
Adolf Loos designed some incredibly sumptuous interiors. They aren't lacking in color. Methinks he's being used unjustly as a scapegoat to grind some axe. To me, this essay is an example of "slop."
To double down on that notion—the baroque rococo interiors that the author idolises at the end were the exclusive purview of the astonishingly wealthy, in no small part because of how expensive they were to implement. Accordingly they were equated with absolutism and corruption.
It's hard to decide how much of the author's position is born from ignorance versus how much of it is born from disingenuousness.
308 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadI wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.
You're not going to get people to pay you $80 for a meal, but you could get them to pay you that much for an experience.
You didn't see as much of that before social media because it was a waste of money to run ads for that stuff on TV. (But you could find no shortage of them in print magazines.)
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.
But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.
Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.
I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.
This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.
I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.
Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.
So do we currently live lives completely devoid of meaning? That's certainly what it feels like. That's certainly what the color schemes available to us connote.
So much fear of meaning we remove all meaning from our environment....
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1jnr4bz/...
By the comments, I don't think I'm the only one.
Look at the logo evolution.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LivingMas/comments/17yizkw/evolutio...
Why is Taco Bell slowly losing color like a vampire is draining it of fun and blood? I see these driving around and I just shake my head, what about light purple and white represents Mexican culture and food? It's the whitest thing they could do without making the sign all white. Same thing with Target. Now some of the logos are white on white!
https://www.designyourway.net/blog/target-logo/
It's odd that in this era where we are supposed to be embracing diversity and difference that we are homogenizing our logos to white or gray goo.
(edit) I do think we've swung a little hard in the direction of color minimalism recently; it can get oppressive when combined with the trend towards minimalism in structure and form too. But I think it's fine for the default to err toward inoffensiveness and color to be used purposefully, and if/when public opinion shifts away from that there isn't exactly any impediment to design shifting with it.
In a similar vein, all those old grey marble statues the Greeks and Romans made used to be bathed in riotous color before the paint flaked off.
I think that the visual exhaustion comes from the fact that the thing we see everyday are made to catch our attention and not to decorate. So ads, shits and giggles that don't really add to our experience but that catch - and drain - our attention
Then again I'd probably be fine with a super duper wallpaper like this so perhaps we won't agree on some things such as having few colorful elements https://www.photowall.com/ee/memphis-piazza-panorama-wallpap...
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/vintage-bathroom-makeover-p...
But overall I agree. If everything is uber-colorful, that can become just overwhelming. Also we are a lot more stimulated throughout the day with screen and movies and games. In the olden days you didn't have a smartphone with a colorful screen, so putting lots of colour in your house or your church made more sense.
I'd want less advertisement, and more thoughtful color choices throughout cities and digital spaces.
Is hard panning really strongly recommended like that, or just a hold over that the old heads learned and passed down
By the time the hard-panned records of the 60s were made the technology was already old, it was just a stylistic choice.
Also IIRC, I believe George Harrison’s kid remixed it properly, just a handful of years ago.
Recordings in the 1960s were mixed to be played back on stereo speakers. You can hard pan stuff and in your living room where you listen to it, it will produce a nice pleasant stereo image because each ear can hear some of both speakers.
Today, audio engineers mix music to be listened to primarily on headphones. If you pan something hard left, it's literally not going to be heard in the right ear at all which sounds horrifically artificial.
So now music has to be mixed to synthetize a pleasant soundstage when heard on headphones.
could a factor driving current monotone style be less about aesthetics and taste and more that we're all just cognitively exhausted?
everything is fighting for our attention because our attention has been monetized. so when something bland shows up, it simultaneously provides a bit of respite and can seem more 'trustworthy' because it isn't clamoring for your attention.
if i were buying some kitchen appliances and i had a choice between a brightly colored models or a stark, utilitarian models, i have to admit that the stark ones have appeal because they "look professional" (even though it may not actually be pro quality) and "the color is just a sales gimmick" (even though boring industrial grey is also a sales gimmick)
If you include electronic media as a source of this cognitive exhaustion, then I'm with you. If greyscale dominates the physical environment, then it's a reaction to something equally pervasive.
My impression from the data is not that greyscale now dominates the physical environment, but that browns once dominated. Presumably because things like wood, copper, etc. once dominated the materials we engrossed ourselves in. As we've expanded the paints and other materials we live with, we've found much more balance.
I don't care if my kettle looks "professional"; one is pink, another is orange.
But I prefer walls around me to be white or very lightly colored, not, say, intensively red. That would constantly distract me.
Code in my editor is colorful like a Christmas tree, bur most of the interface is muted beige and green. This is about certain things requiring my attention, and others sparing it.
When everything is loud, nothing is, nothing stands out. Bold colors often work better as accents.
(Sometimes it's about non-aesthetic considerations. I prefer my car to be approximately white to soak in less of the hot summer summer sun.)
Paint colors subtractively from light: you never get more light into a room when you're knocking out wavelengths rather then reflecting them. Whereas with whiter walls you always have the option of manipulating color by using colored lighting.
i find it cognitively exhausting to watch movies that are so dark that most times i cannot even see the eye color of the cast
This is a trend, not an opinion.
Once you step outside, it does matter though. If your own home is shades of grey, then any colour you encounter outside is going to seem garish.
Visually exhausting you say? If you are being stressed by the colours of the world, then that's a problem of your own making.
In terms of the colors of the world... I'm fine with nature... it's the man-made that gets to be garish at times.
I saw some pictures from a house where everything was white. The walls were white, the tables and chairs were white, the pillows were white, lamps were white, etc. But I bet the owner didn't see it as everything being white, like I did. I bet that when they'd look at the same pictures, they'd see all the little details here and there that were not white, or not quite white enough. I imagine them being in a constant state of stress over the non-white blemishes.
I don't know them, I just saw the pictures, so I don't truly know how they feel, I could be just imagining things. But my gut feeling is that someone with a home like that is not at ease with themselves.
I don't think I'd ever want something all that monochrome for myself. To me, subdued isn't about monochrome so much as limiting the noise. I don't even mind a sharp contrast, such as a colorful photo/painting. It's what I can only describe as visual noise that gets me. Especially with patterns that aren't really something you'd see in nature.
This is meaningless.
"When many things are different, everything is the same".
Its a sentence that seems meaningful, but actually is not. It's just abstraction without generalizing.
"000000000000000000000000000" is a sequence just as something as "H90F3iJsjo$(4Opla1zSKX@)!2k" because in the second sequence they're different and in the first they're all the same? Great, you just discovered sets and the axiom of choice.
We are literally discussing the difference within the sets! Obviously the second sequence is more diverse.
First, I thought your argument was going somewhere but then it took this turn.
I would agree with the first part and then argue that before the synthetics-revolution things were mostly just shades of browns(which is a type of dark unsaturated orange). Except for the upper classes who could afford the expensive colors. Now that color is cheap and normalized, it lost (some) of its allure. Not being able to signal your wealth anymore.
Now adding just a conjecture of mine; Now that 'clean' is still somewhat more expensive(upper classes still being able to afford more cleanliness by using other peoples labor), minimal textures(not literal textures but design-wise) are more attractive because it displays your wealth. Plain-white being the easiest to see blemishes on. With black being easier look unblemished. Also, 'tasteful' color arrangements will still signal your class somewhat due to requiring cultural knowledge.
I'm with GP on this, I'd prefer most things be somewhat subdued and letting key pieces come out. The subdued doesn't have to expressly be a shade of gray or brown/tan either.
"00000000qq000000000I0000000"
Now I'm going to change your second example, also by three characters. Can you see what stands out?
"H90F3iJsjo$(4ORma1sSKX@)!2k"
Is that a clearer example of what I'm trying to say? In the second example, because every symbol stands out, no symbol stands out. Or to put it more technically, noise has overwhelmed any signal.
And more neutral environments with accent colors makes sense because the main accent is always people and their clothing. Your patterned red dress won't clash with a neutral background. It will likely clash with a patterned orange wall. A more neutral environment allowed for lots of colored accents to exist without competing or clashing with them.
A room always full of people might not need much decoration.
In a private office, you might want to hang a colorful painting and have some colorful knick-knacks, or a colorful sofa.
You figure out the right amount of color accents for you. But without overwhelming the senses by painting the whole room bright orange, you know?
> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents.
Yes, there's no such thing as "objectively correct" when it comes to design. But it's where Western society currently is in terms of the design of public spaces including offices, how your realtor will advise you to redecorate when putting your home for sale, etc. And there are principles of modern design that, while not judgeable as correct/incorrect, are widely accepted as established.
So that's great you like to be bombarded with color, but I'm talking about an explanation for where society has been and how it's evolved with regard to color.
It's perfectly meaningful. When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
> Possessing prominent and varied colors.
If you want a more academic source; try https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/courses/120/Lectures/... slides 13 & 14. Colour isn't some random distraction, the human vision system uses it to help decide what to focus on. Then you get things like peacocks where they go all in on using colourful visualisations to attract attention.
Why not? Different colors stand out. Even gray on black does. They are just not colorful.
Look at this painting - [0]. Are you telling me the red tone doesn't stand out?
[0] - https://largemodernart.com/products/original-abstract-art-oi...
Which colour stands out here? https://business.cap.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/cap_ex...
> When everything is colourful you can't use colour to stand out. It's very simple. Obvious even.
My example is clearly a colorful painting, very vibrant, yet certain tones stand out. What you said is literally wrong. It's neither simple nor obvious. Spell out what you meant. Your counter example isn't obvious either.
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 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.
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.
I don't think it's really a meaningful visualization. They're trying to show something 2D in 1 dimension.
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.
Also, pop art.
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.
I should mention that the Bauhaus (1920s)broke out color theory as separate from graphics representation.
What a load of crap. Where do you live, in a cave? have you ever been in a jungle perhaps? what about birds with colorful feathers? you want to wash out those colors too? jesus, nature dictates and nature is full of vivid colors. so your argument goes down the drain.
there is no such thing as modern taste. there are trends dictated by a handful of psychotic gatekeepers who got hooked on their own farts.
old movies had the absolute best coloring. compare those movies to the ones seen now and you are on the verge of retching. these superficial, devoid of human value superprocessed heaps of shit they try to force feed to people, just plain unwatchable. not just the story lacks, it has zero message, nothing to chew on, just some brainwashing action scenes. that's good for the plebs they say while squeezing people for money.
absolutely reprehensible, that a handful of gatekeepers put people into these literal psycho gardens that is devoid of anything resembling human. what's missing is the human part. the humanity is slowly missing from everything.
But can you please take the personal attacks elsewhere? HN is not the place for those.
do not hide behind some weeny invisible bs wall you erected
That's a personal attack.
Please review the HN guidelines.
I don't consider this to be a be-all, end-all of design, but I appreciate that designs following this approach can be stunningly beautiful. That said, this is not the problem. The problem is, what happens these days, someone films your room with that "gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background" and... color grades the shit out of color, making it near pitch-black on non-HDR TVs (and most computer screens) and merely grey with tiny amounts of trace color on HDR TVs.
This is the problem - or at least its TV aspect. That Napoleon example was spot on - most movies these days look like the right half, whereas anything remotely approaching realism would make it look like the left half. And TFA correctly notices the same washing out of colors is happening to products and spaces in general (which means double trouble when that's filmed and then color-graded some more).
But if you watch any comedy, or reality show, or plenty of "normal" dramas, on a regular TV, the color is normal.
However, yes, there has been a certain trend involving Christopher Nolan, "gritty realism", and legal-political-military-crime themes, to do color grading to massively reduce saturation and aggressively push towards blue. I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff. It's stylistic the same way film noir was. Some people hated that back in the day too, now it's just seen as a style of the time.
It's not. There's even a term coined for it, "intangible sludge". https://www.vox.com/culture/22840526/colors-movies-tv-gray-d...
> I don't like it much but you can also just not watch that stuff.
It's now permeated everything, so it's hard to not watch stuff, as it's everywhere, with few exceptions.
The whole show, like everything in the past decade or so, was dark and washed out (except for some space FX parts, where at least some colors were saturated, sometimes). This lasted up until the last two episodes, where for plot reasons[0], some protagonists found themselves onboard a ship from TNG-era shows (1980s - 2000s), pulled straight from a museum, which means the set was recreated as it was on old shows, complete with the lighting. From that scene onwards through the final episode, as it jumped between that one special set and every other dark and gray scene, I had proof in front of me that scenes in modern shows can be properly lit, they just aren't, and it's an active choice[1].
Importantly, this scene wasn't a one-off gimmick that risked coming out too bright on normal people's HDR-enabled TV screens. The set involved was, per the showrunner, pretty much the whole raison d'etre for the entire season, and they burned most of the season's budget on perfecting it[2]. Them being able to light it well (and have it coexist with every other badly-lit scene) only proves there's no technical obstacle involved - that dark and washed out TV is just a choice everyone's making for... unclear reasons.
--
[0] - Hard to navigate around a major spoiler and highlight of the era in the franchise.
[1] - Actually, I can't give this scene enough justice. But given how massive moment that was for people following the franchise, I'll just provide a link to the video (SPOILER WARNING): https://youtu.be/t-mY4Xbjyn8?t=42 -- watch in max quality; compare okay-ish exterior CG early on, observe how dark and washed out scenes with people are - and this is literally how the entire season (and really, entire show) was until that point... or just scroll to 2:27, and then on a perfect cue - "computer, lights!" - observe how next 30 seconds reveal that everything could've been properly lit from the start, but for some non-tech reason, it wasn't.
[2] - Most of that was eaten up by casting very specific people, but the set itself was damn expensive too.
It's just a question of aesthetics. TNG was lit almost more like a sitcom, with bright even lighting coming from all directions. In the 1990's, that made TNG look like a TV show, and look very different from dramatic movies.
Then with the rise of TV as an art form rivaling movies, certain dramatic TV shows have been lit more like dramatic, dark movies. Lots of highlights and shadows, instead of even lightning. It's meant to seem more sophisticated, serious, and artful. It also demands that you be watching in more of a cinema-like environment -- a bright, high-contrast TV in a dark room, so you can see the darks. Not a crappy low-contrast screen in a bright room.
But again, this is only certain types of shows. Comedies and "lighter" dramas are still lit more like TNG. It really depends on the show, and what mood the creators want to evoke throughout.
When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".
Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)
It is. The article you link even begins:
> So many TV shows and movies now
That's what I'm taking about. Those "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama.
You're not seeing it in comedies. You're not seeing it in reality shows. There are also plenty of dramas that don't have it, possibly a majority but I'm not sure.
It's not everywhere, contrary to what you say. It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
and from this you somehow deduce "hose "so many" belong mostly to a certain type of drama."
Where "certain type of drama" is anything from procedurals to action, from drama to fantasy.
> It may, however, seem "everywhere" if you're only watching that type of drama.
Where the article uses the following "certain type of drama" examples: Justice League, Dexter. Definitely they both fall into the category of "the same type of drama".
> You're not seeing it in comedies.
As in: modern comedies are washed out and desaturated more often than not. For every Barbie there's a dozen Red Notices
Yes, the type of drama does include the range you're describing. Movies are mixes of genres, tones, categories.
And no, modern comedies are not desaturated "more often than not". I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case.
When your "certain type of drama" covers every genre under the sun, and you pretend that Dexter and Justice League are somehow the dame type of genre, excuse me for bot taking your words seriously.
> I don't know what comedies you're watching, but it's not the case.
Whatever comes across my radar.
BTW it's also quite telling how in your classification there's "certain type of drama" (90% of genres apparently) that is susceptible to the sludge, and then comedies and reality shows (the only two you could come up with that are not. Even though comedies, especially movies, are often just as drab and gray as every other genre)
I never said "genre". I said "type of drama". There are probably a hundred subgenres of drama, yes including both Dexter and Justice League. There isn't some clean perfect distinction for which directors choose go use the dark look and which don't. I'm lumping the ones that go dark into a "type". I've got to use some word to group them.
Also, what do you mean "the only two you could come up with that are not"? There are fundamentally three types of entertainment TV: comedy, reality, and drama. Only one of them adopts the dark look commonly, in some of its content.
And you're just flat-out wrong about comedies being "often just as drab and gray as every other genre". That's just... wrong. I don't know what else to tell you.
You're absolutely wrong, it happened to video games too. The industry defended it by saying it made games look more "realistic", but have since backed off after consumers revolted and dubbed the aesthetic "piss filter."
Started in the mid 00s, went strong for about a decade and still persists to a lesser degree today. Only designers like it, consumers broadly hate it.
I can't speak to video games, but of course it would make sense it would apply to dramatic video games as well.
Color grading itself isn't the problem. It's just a creative tool that can be used well or poorly. The problem is the intentional stylistic choices being made with the tool. I don't have strong opinions about TFAs arguments re: color in general but as someone deep into cinema production technology, there's a troubling lack of visual diversity in modern cinema and it's not just color, it's dynamic range and texture too.
It's crazy because this is happening in an era when digital cinema workflows from cameras to file formats to post-production allow everyone to capture, manipulate and distribute visuals with unprecedented levels of fidelity and dynamic range. Even DSLRs down to $3000 can capture full frame 4k camera raw with >14 stops of dynamic range which is insane. The great cinematographers of the past needed incredible skill to capture dynamic range from deep shadows to punchy highlights on film and it was always a risk since they had to wait for dailies. And they had little latitude to manipulate the image captured on the camera negative in post.
Today's imagers, formats and tools make capturing immense dynamic range not only fast and easy but cheap and virtually risk-free yet so much cinema looks flat and boring - and there's no technical reason for it. This video shows compelling examples contrasting recent movies with those shot on film in the 90s but also movies shot on much less capable digital cinema cameras in the early 2000s proving it's not digital or grading that's driving this. "Why don't movies look like movies any more?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTUM9cFeSo.
According to Hollywood cinematographers in the video it's partly intentional artistic choices, part the impact of composing and lighting for HDR, part lack of creativity and production skill and a big part over focus on flat lighting for VFX shots (because the more expressive the digital camera negative is, the harder it is for VFX teams to match with CGI). I'd add another factor which is that younger cinematographers, LDs and camera ops who learned on high dynamic range digital cinema cameras have been trained to shoot a flat LUT. While this technically maximizes the latitude available for color grading in post (which is generally a good thing), the issue is that many extend this to composing and lighting shots that have virtually no expressive look in the captured digital negative at all. Color grading in post should be for small tweaks, conforming shot-to-shot variance, mastering and, occasionally, saving the day when something goes wrong with a shot. While modern editing and grading tools are immensely powerful, re-framing and grading in post cannot substitute for creative on-set lighting, lensing, composition and exposure choices. Great cinematographers still create their looks with lighting, lens and camera as if there were going to be no grading in post. Unfortunately, this seems to increasingly be an under-valued skill.
The requirements of modern VFX also contribute in an indirect way as well. It takes on-set time and energy for the camera teams to capture and check the increasingly complex list of clean plates, reflection map spheres and color/contrast references with specialized LUTs and metadata at a variety of apertures for every shot. This takes time away from traditional lighting and composition and ultimately producers don't budget enough time. When something has to give - it's not going to be the VFX plates. In modern effects-heavy productions, the VFX director always has a team on-set for every shot verifying they're getting what they need. While this is necessary and understandable, unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. The cinematographer is not supervising the lighting and composition of all the major VFX elements because they are being produced by a dozen differen...
But I also disagree with its claim that black shadows everywhere are "cinematic" and desirable.
They're a limitation of film at the time. When I watch those classic movies, I don't like the fact that all the shadows are crushed. I feel like half the frame is hiding texture that ought to be there. I like the dynamic range of modern cameras.
We didn't "forget" how to "make movies look like movies". We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom. And like always, people will disagree over aesthetic choices.
I totally understand what you mean, though, about lighting vs grading, and where what gets done, but there are good arguments for doing more with grading rather than in the lighting. It ultimately allows the editor+grader+director to make a lot more choices, and that's generally a good thing. You say "color grading in post should be for small tweaks" but I respectfully disagree. And obviously, there isn't even a choice when it comes to the outdoors in daytime -- it has to be done in the grading.
As I mentioned, the problem is a strange lack of visual diversity in looks. I'm all for increasing artistic and expressive range and I'm not one of those pining for old-school processes. As you said, film had and still has a lot of limitations. Having been involved in both pre-digital film production and analog video production, we had to spend stupid amounts of effort to avoid or overcome the inherent technical limitations we were saddled with. It was incredibly frustrating and I'd spend time dreaming about a future where those technical (and chemical) limitations no longer haunted us. I guess that's why I'm sort of dismayed that so many creators aren't utilizing the truly incredible technical fidelity even consumer gear provides today.
I should also have mentioned I don't fully agree with every point made in the video I linked but it is a terrific way to highlight that the issue isn't technical limitations of digital production. It's either an explicit creative choice to settle for visual blandness or the result of not making explicit choices leading to an ambient default sameness.
> We decided that there's a wider range of ways movies can look, and we're intentionally taking advantage of that for creative freedom.
That's what I find delightful about today's best work. And I'm fine respecting different creative choices, as long as someone actually thought about it and made those choices intentionally because they believed it was the best realization of their unique vision. But it's also true that the range of looks in today's content isn't as wide as it should be. There are still too many productions that suffer from that default blandness due to a lack of creative intention. I just refuse to believe so many DPs really woke up passionately committed to that particular orange/teal palette as the ideal expressive vision for their current project. Or the recent epidemic of 'HDR-flat' desaturation. We can and should strive to do better - to think and create different and deploy the full palette of expression we're so fortunate to finally have at our fingertips. I want to see and celebrate a broad range of expressively unique, creatively opinionated looks - even ones I don't personally care for - whether created in-camera, in grading or even purely in CGI.
I should also add that there's still an element of technical limitation driving some of this default to visual conservatism. Sadly, inconsistent (and sometimes just broken) HDR implementations across consumer viewing platforms is a frustrating issue and I sympathize with colorists and mastering engineers prepping content for literally 200 different distribution formats. While technically-based, these issues are all the more tragic because there's no underlying reason it had to be such a shit show of uneven implementation. HDR, wide color gamuts and deep color spaces are all well-specified and purely in the digital domain. High-quality digital processing and conversion is inexpensive and built into even cheap HDMI encoder chips so even the cheapest consumer displays with limited capabilities should be able to map content created with higher color spaces and wide dynamic ranges so that they still broadly represent the creator's intent. Yet too many still fail to properly handle mapping HDR and WCG content.
Ha! Indeed. Yup, agreed on all points you've made.
Besides the obvious factors of time and budget, I think it's precisely the technical freedom we have that a lot of people simply don't know how to use. If we have 100x the visual possibilities now, it might also be fair to say that it requires 10x training to be able to use them well. I'm not convinced it's necessarily a lack of creativity, but more just a lack of knowledge and expertise around what's even possible.
Agreed. Great creatives are still great (and still too rare). In addition to the lack of technical proficiency and creative aspiration, I also suspect there's an element of some directors/DPs on VFX blockbusters assuming all the sensational VFX elements in the frame simply overwhelm beautifully subtle, artistically expressive in-camera cinematography or maybe make it matter less. I can't really fault them for assuming that as it's sometimes at least somewhat true (for some viewers). But then I look at an extraordinary outlier example of VFX-soaked comic book movie lensed brilliantly like The Batman compared to a typically competent example like recent live action Spiderman and realize... nope, it still matters - it's just really hard to do well and integrate with VFX. (Some good comparison examples in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STynLl-2FqU).
I hate this with passion with cars - sea of grey in western Europe. Heck, both of our cars are grey - we always buy used ones and there was simply no other option that wasn't 10k more expensive for params we wanted and were willing to pay. It looks bland, boring, unimaginative. One of top reasons why buy new - one can actually choose something nicer.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over India and boy do they use crazy intense colors all over and everywhere including clothing - orange, purple, pink, very bright, both men and women. A very, very nice visual experience one doesn't get used to. Then coming back to western civilization where literally everybody dresses in black or dark grey during winter. Its just sad view, like winter with low amount of sunlight isn't depressing enough, no lets add some more monotonous colors.
Sensory overload argument is particularly painful here, because it's essentially saying that the one thing you and me want to look colorful - the entertainment we choose - is doomed to be washed out because the stuff we don't want to see - advertising - has to overdo stimulus to catch attention.
I disagree. The 60s through the 80s had a wide color palette with extremely good design. Early 1900s too. Heck even the Greek statues were extremely colorful.
You can see the same with dishes. Clothes. Book covers.
I can agree that I don't want everything to look like a riot, as it were. I do sometimes think a bit more color would be nice.
Kodak also had Kodachrome by the 30s, despite nostalgia for Paul Simon's early solo work.
The more common earlier color adoptions had to do with pigments in paint and especially fabrics. Bold red was so popular for shirts for men over a century that hand-me-down worn-out pinks were considered "boys colors."
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/05/01/pink-blue/
> It's bad design
Says whom? Do you represent the design police? I was never there, don't know the person, and don't know what a person even is, so I'm not guilty, occifer! I'd like a lawyer present, please.
However, if everyone followed that same "modern taste," everything would look alike. Just as the technicolor era had its appeal, so do bold color palettes.
The best approach depends on the desired effect and overall design.
You've got me imagining a bright green room filled with silver appliances and white furniture.
I think the duller colors we see nowadays has something to do with the ongoing minimalism trend. Minimalism is seen as professional-looking. Unfortunately, now we have the problem that brands struggle to differentiate themselves because any overly creative design risks coming across as 'unprofessional'. The balance of 'appearing unique' and 'appearing professional' has shifted towards the latter.
In a broader sense, it reflects society's shift towards increased centralization and conformity and an intolerance towards outliers.
But nothing is colorful. Every damn thing is a shade of gray. It's like "50 shade of gray" fans started doing UIs.
Why manufacture objects in 10 different colours if you know the green one is going to be a tough sell? Why buy a blue car if you think you’re going to sell it back after 2 years and struggle to do so?
You don’t want things you don’t intend to keep to have personally, period.
my startup varietyiq is working towards helping apparel businesses do this / have seen it work very well.
A weird thing I noticed was that if an item came in an assortment of colors that included yellow, yellow was always the slowest color to sell. Often bins would end up with just yellow inventory after all the other colors had sold. But I discovered that if I removed the yellow samples from the bin entirely that the overall sales for the item would plummet.
I'd often joke that we should open up another store that only sold yellow merchandise as a way to move the excess inventory that built up from me implementing a yellow-buffering system, but instead we'd just end up donating them to a school or giving them away on Easter or whatever.
Like it's a perceptual disease where there's a difference between real preferences and perceived preferences and people are making decisions based on their wrong assumptions about everyone else, and when everyone is doing it it becomes true even though we're collectively all making less optimal choices.
When we bought our current house it was perfect except the colors were an awful neutral grey - I had a hard time convincing my wife despite the otherwise perfection, and only did because we spent several thousand dollars getting it repainted before we moved in. I'm sure the sellers realtor thought the neutral colors were a great idea, but they almost cost several thousand dollars (there was a bidding war when we bought the house, we almost didn't bid and so the sellers would have lost).
The important point is if you like color make sure you pay for it, and reject things if they don't have the color you want.
No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
You can get a black one, a white one, a grey one, or then maybe two or three others that are most often in a red/green/blue/green which is really more of a flavored grey or black. Currently the Toyota Camry, really the only paint you can get where I'd (in a perhaps slightly silly restrictive way) would call "a color" is red. The other 11 options are either greyscale or slightly tinted greyscale.
Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.
So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.
When computers were beige, they went all in on color to stand out. When everything started being more colorful, they moved to white and then grey/silver. Now that everything is grey/silver, they're moving to gold/rose.
Only the living room has any colors. Bedroom and bathroom are as boring as can be, so that you do your shit, don't get distracted, and get back to the living room.
(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)
I will take latest matrix. The movie was awful, of course, but I was in awe of its bright, vivid, wonderful color work. If only plot was better.
I watched the Lord of the Rings over Christmas, and I was stunned by how colorful the movie is. Even in the darkest scenes in Mordor, it felt more colorful than movies of today.
Today, it looks like everything is shot in log and then someone does not add the saturation back. But I am also guilty of this .. when I got my new camera, my graded clips also looked very flat, but I like(d) that look because of all the movies and youtube videos looking like this.
The Matrix was a year before that, but they had a narrative reason to use grading, and did so quite well.
Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.
In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.
1. https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
I am a huge fan of color and go out of my way to buy bright colored cars, phones, etc. (Not like I had any viable options for my MacBook Pro though).
Resale value, it hides dirt well are some of the sadder excuses I hear for buying gray and "silver" cars (wouldn't be cool if they really were silver, not "metallic gray"). Meanwhile you spend your entire time owning the car and driving around like a brooding storm cloud.
Color grading might be the most evil thing to descend on film making. It's to the point of distraction now. Like it draws attention to itself. (Watching "Mickey 17" in a theater and a scene comes on that screams "color graded!" and then it's become all I can see. Kind of like the nausea-inducing, shaky "hand held camera" thing that was so predominate some decades ago. Good riddance to that.
Oh well, I guess all I can do is to keep voting with my shopping preferences.
Maybe we should be more blissful, not sure what leads to bliss....
I remember Midsommar being another particularly bad example - the entire apartment set in the opening scenes is dressed in orange/teal. Down to book spines, vases and light fittings.
It's interesting to see films that don't use strong grading at all. I think Star Wars wasn't too bad here because the whole visual language was set up in the 70s and everything now tries to reflect it (lots of primaries in control panels because those were the lamps they could use back then). They do have "planet" grades but it's not too bad.
Shudders. A lot of shows were utterly unwatchable for me.
(Now they're just unwatchable because of the mumbling/whispering and the colour palettes tweaked to the extent nothing has any contrast left.)
This. If you look at the cars, pretty much the only "stock" bright color is red. I used to drive a grass green car (vinyl wrap), and it stood out everywhere.
I wish car makers offered more color options by default.
Even Mazda doesn't offer them for all their vehicles.
Still, I think we’re seeing a LOT more color. From the cool khaki blue Subaru color that was so popular, to the M2 BMW in baby blue, to the Audi e-tron in purple, to the corvettes and mustangs that I rarely see in monochromatic colors.
Apple really drops the ball on colors in 99% of their products. You have the iMac and.... oh wait, that's it. There are no real colors on the pro phones and even the non-pro phones looks like something that got 1 of 10 coats of color. And then the MBPs have a handful of shades of gray, I would totally buy a green or blue MBP if there was one.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32425520
Once you see it you can't unsee it and it starts to look very ugly very fast.
1. Flat vertical panels are a no-no. Adding creases increases buckling resistance.
2. That's a hugely important area for cabin noise because the side mirrors cause turbulence and the vehicle body needs a channel to constrain the turbulent flow and flex as little as possible near the door seals.
3. The skin needs to expand outwards from the line of the pillars to fit the window mechanisms, the handles/locks, and the side impact protection without intruding into the cabin space.
4. It makes the car look more sporty and interesting. The technical term for the crease itself is "character line", and it's the main reason why the Corolla has one. It's visual reinforcement for the modern standard combo of low hoods-high trunks that's considered attractive styling.
5. The greenhouse (cabin) narrows towards the top for rollover safety and aerodynamic reasons (a.k.a tumblehome), and this needs to blend with the rest of the body in a visually appealing way. The cybertruck is a good example of how unusual it can look if this is just a straight line on the body. Here's a comparison between the current design and an ai-generated "rounded" design [2] [3].
[1] https://file.kelleybluebookimages.com/kbb/base/evox/CP/44005...
[2] https://www.motortrend.com/files/67a2770e2906d20008bad29f/1-...
[3] https://static0.carbuzzimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploa...
Noticeably, though, the colours don't date the equipment. 20 years ago the colours were the same, and 20 years from now it is very likely that the brand new ones will still feature the same colours still.
That hasn't been the case for passenger vehicles. They are famous for having a colour available this year and gone the next, so if you have one of those no-longer-available colours it sticks out like a sore thumb as looking old. Which is what I believe the consumer truly fears – owning a car that looks old and dated.
The blacks and whites have remained consistently available, so it is far less risky.
From a buyer's perspective there's still a choice of color if you have no allegiance to brand, but the monochromatic tribalism of each brand (and their loyalists) is strangely fascinating.
Case in point. The last of the ACGO tractors in orange now look old and dated even though the otherwise _identical_[1] Massey Ferguson tractors from the same era still look relatively modern.
[1] Technically they had different engines, but that isn't visible anyway.
Living in Oregon I don't want a car that blends in with the asphalt and clouds. I want a florescent lime green car that's easy to see. Those are hard to come by.
Also, I recall traveling to Athens Greece back in 1999 and wondering why people were all wearing greys, charcoals, black? I posited that they were depressed or something. Recall that the 90s were still pretty colorful in regards to clothing here in the US. And then just a couple of years later people here were all starting to wear those greys, charcoals and black.
Offtopic, but did you look into painting options? It's often cheaper to buy a better car and just repaint it. My friend have a lime car (with some original color saved for the accents) because they did that. You mentioned the colour specifically and I remembered that it wasn't that pricey
Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.
Cars: Searching online I found this chart: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev... - and ... it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time. A paragraph here - https://www.colorwithleo.com/why-isnt-green-a-popular-car-co... - provides something insightful:
"Historical Perceptions of Green Cars
For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."
But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.
Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.
This is driven in part by a shift towards mobile screens and the compression in visual space. Even on the desktop the favicon has an influence with this deconstruction.
Because buying anything not in the standard white/black/corporate gray is easily an extra thousand euros on top of the car price. Red is still sometimes offered as standard color.
Just checked. I drive a Mazda CX-30. In Sweden literally anything that is not white is 500 to 1000 euro extra: https://www.mazda.se/bygg-din-mazda/MAZDA%20CX-30/5WGN/# skip to Exteriörlack (exterior color).
This worship of color is how you end up with Gen Z who paint over beautiful bare wood furniture and cabinets. Enraging.
And pure reason is inhuman.
Color represents emotions, form represents reason. Since emotions is a big part of human nature, the loss of color means the western society has been sliding into a depression, and the west is depressed because it's falling under the influence of the origin of this colorless stereometric brutalism.
https://culture.ghost.io/cultural-stasis-produces-fewer-chee...
He writes about incentives since the 1990s that have pushed artists to shy away from making bold aesthetic choices that might seem dated a few years later.
The result is more stability and a longer shelf-life for culture, but less experimentation and fewer ways for new styles to break out.
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
I would see God's as hedonistic but not greeks. Honestly, my bias is that they were very boring amd sort of artificial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome
Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.
The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.
The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.
It's hard to decide how much of the author's position is born from ignorance versus how much of it is born from disingenuousness.
If you feel so, it is a massive red flag that your brain is in a depressive state.
Source: fixed my mental demons and now the world is suddenly full of color and life, as if I was a child again