Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Pick A Color

What's your favorite color?

When it comes to conversing with children, one common topic of conversation besides what foods one might like is the classic, "What's your favorite color?" Children are subject to as much peer pressure as we adults, and thus you can see their sway in color favoritism as a dynamic norm that fluctuates based upon their company.

Selecting a color on the computer isn't an easy task. We are told by a myriad of computer manufacturer's marketing materials that there are over 16 million colors to choose from on today's computer screens (and there's 68 billion on higher-end systems). I remember when there was only three choices for the color on my computer screen -- some combination of black with either phosphor-green, soothing-amber, or dirty-white. I recall becoming frustrated one time and augmenting my display screen with the ink from whiteboard markers so as to simulate having a color screen. Today we know that people are not forced to resort to such desperate measures anymore. We have great color screens, and fabulous color printers. Life couldn't be any better really.

However when I lived in the monochrome world, I do recall that I never had to ask myself the question, "What color should I use?" as I really had only one choice. "Hmmmmm ... okay ... let's see ... all right ... I'll use green." And then, "Ooooh, this is tough ... well ... yeah ... it's got to be green." And so forth.

I've spent two weeks trying to re-understand computer color (i.e. the wonderful world of RGB -- Red, Green, Blue) and the bizarro world of the conversion of RGB to HSV -- Hue, Saturation, Value) and I finally understand that HSV is simply an evil bastardization of the color scale of the natural world. I wrote a variety of computer codes to finally tame the various scales in order to create an algorithm to give me a good set of color selections. Many people have already done this quite well. Why am I doing it? Well, because I don't like the colors that are generated with their methods. Hmm, that's not fair. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned wheel inventor and I really like to re-invent the wheel as often as possible.

The left 2 columns are simply random color selections; the middle 2 columns are my picks. Since color is highly subjective, you might actually like the random selections better (I at first had a hard time buying that my selections were any better). The right 2 columns represents a compromise -- the majority are my picks, with a random element thrown in just for good luck. And luck is what I need as my Cartier exhibition looms quite ominously in a few months.

Posted by maeda at July 10, 2005 11:50 AM