We all have seen hints of the 80's sprinkled here and there throughout the design world, right? With the 80's in mind, I had to go with pink and black, and not just any pinks, but rich, bold pinks.

I must admit that I have been watching commercials from this totally rad decade and pretty much miss how fun and bold everything was. So, here are the
colors black and pink used in home decor items.

What do you think?

agate platters, crayon pen, luminary, vase, camera, clothespin, pillow,  pet feeder, chair

For the second year in a row more than 30,000 people descended into the Rothbury Music Festival set against the scenic backdrop of Michigan's west coast and hidden amongst the forest on the land of Double JJ Ranch. Besides music, Rothbury invites a number of found object artists and runs a series of panel discussions with leading entrepreneurs and scientists. Together, they transform the grounds with natural mandalas and epic shrines, all made from found objects collected from the grounds and around Michigan, and create a thoughtful dialog about sustainability. Bringing these two sides to the festival together is the "passion based" organization Our Future Now, which sets to spread environmental and social awareness by combining art, science and community.

Art Installations

Emerald Installations is made up of Scott O'Keefe, Christopher Reitmaier and Nateure (a person), and, well, nature (actual nature) as well, since they only use found and donated objects, many of which are given by the trees and plants.

The group, lead by Scott, has been invited to Coachella, UofC Berkley, Joshua Tree Festival and other institutions and festivals to reshape the natural environment, inspiring attendees to take a moment and realize their surroundings and themselves, for that matter.

Here's a selection of great infographics found over at Infographics News and Francesco Mugnai. Some may look familiar, as many have been very popular and made their way around the web in last year, but they're all examples of good color use. The color palettes are consistent throughout the graphics without making things unnecessarily complicated with palettes that strain the eyes or make use of too many colors.

50 Years of Space Exploration

Link

How Do You Want Your Coffee?

Link
A classic infographic.

This is a guest post written by Vivien from Inspirationbit. You can see the original post here.

Did you know that colour and visual elements activate the right brain (emotions), while the printed words activate the left brain (logic)? Colour and Typography remain to be the two most important elements in design. When you harmoniously combine them all you attract a quicker attention to the subject, reinforce impact and recognition, help in establishing powerful identities and brand, set a mood. Today we examine the DOs and DON’Ts in designing with colour.

Babies are colour-dominant: they are more attracted by colour than form. And even though we generally become more form-dominant as we mature, colour still plays an important role on how we perceive the message. For instance, why does red always call to attention? Whether you want to tweak the colours of your site, or design an ad or a poster to attract people to your products or services, or even paint the walls in your house, these colour essentials should help you in becoming more colour-wise.

DO take time to learn the colour wheel.

All colours are made up of three primaries: red, blue and yellow. When you combine the primaries, you get the three secondary colours: orange, purple and green. When you combine each secondary colour with its neighboring primary, you get six tertiary colours: yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, red-purple, red-orange. That’s how you get the familiar 12-colour wheel.

Every colour has a temperature: from the red/yellow side of the spectrum it’s warm, and from the blue/purple side it’s cool. It has an intensity that’s described as saturation or chroma. Saturation is determined by how much or how little grey a colour contains. High intensity colours are pure, bright and vivid. Less saturated colours are muted, soft and subdued. Every colour has a value, determined by its lightness or darkness. When planning a colour combination, value and saturation are as important as the hue (synonymous with colour).

This is a Guest post by illustrator and web designer Gerren Rabideau. You can see the original post here, or check out the rest of his work over at Gerren Design.

Once upon a time I was building a website and one of the colors I had picked out just wasn't quite right. I kept having to pop in and out of photoshop in order to tweak the color I was using. I didn't understand the Hex code enough to adjust it on the fly. After about an hour of tediously going back and forth with photoshop I gave up and started scouring the internet for a method of using hex code without another visual tools.

Like most people I discovered multiple sites that explain how HTML uses hexadecimal notation (xxxxxx) to define color. Hex code uses base-16 math to write a shorthand version of the binary code that is used to represent each of the different colors in the RGB color set. For instance, #f9f9f9 would be translated into RGB as 249,249,249 and then into binary as 111110011111100111111001. If that was too confusing, just think of #f9f9f9 as "off-white".

This article isn't really about explaining how the hexadecimal color system works. You can find plenty of websites out there that can explain that far better than I can. This article is about developing a method of thinking about hex code that will allow you to read and manipulate it without having to pop into photoshop in order to see the color itself. I've been calling this method "grey 88".

Before I get into that though, lets talk about color sets for a minute...

I come from a fine artist's background and learned about color by applying it to paint. I had my crayon set and yellow plus blue made green. This is because painting is a subtractive color set based on pigments. The chemicals used in creating the paint would react with each other when mixed and create green. You start with a white canvas and add colors until you get black. CMYK works in the same way. Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are pigments that are mixed to create darker colors (black is also used, but only to reduce the need of having to mix CMY all of the time).

CMYK (subtractive color) pigment based

By default, photoshop, your computer monitor, and HTML files use RGB. RGB is an additive color set that is based on mixing light instead of pigments. Your monitor starts with black and adds different spectrums of light until you get white. In RGB the three primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue.

RGB (additive color) light based

Because RGB is based on light it has a much wider gamut of colors than pigment based color sets. In fact, all of the colors in CMYK are also in RGB (the reverse is not true). This means that Hex is unique in the sense that it is really has both RGB and CMYK.

Film

Where The Wild Things Are Character Toys

Medicomtoy; Highsnobiety

The much anticipated release of director Spike Jonze’s live-action adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where The Wild Things Are, is just around the corner. To commemorate the movie, Medicom Toy will be releasing the “Where The Wild Things Are” Kubrick set, featuring overall 6 characters from the movie. Due to come out in October 2009, the Kubrick Set can already be pre-ordered at many toy stores around the globe.

Odd

Best Made Axes

Best Made

"Every high-rise condo, luxury office, executive suite, ranch house, and farmstead must have an axe in it. We know that axes shouldn’t only be in the hands of lumberjacks: anyone and everyone should have an axe in their name. Put it in your cubicle, give it to your niece as a graduation present, or your dad for father's day, bring it to the company picnic, carry it to the door next time Jehovah's Witness come, or just lean it up against your living room wall and admire. An axe is indispensable and sublime, the epitome of self-reliance and independence, a perfect design object, a timeless instrument."

This content was reposted from the Shopping Journal. You can see the original post here.

If you are a smart shopper, it is not that easy to persuade you to actually buy something. There is the science behind how the products are organized, labels are written and sections are ordered to guide you through to making a purchase. That’s a wealth of tricks based on psychological theories and practices that in the end “convert” you from a regular visitor into the buyer.

One of the most powerful methods to appeal to a potential buyer is applying color theory to (e)commerce. Has it ever occurred to you why you feel safer in one store and more energetic in another one? Have you ever noticed that landing on some web page you feel like clicking some button/link and keep browsing the site? While other pages prompt you to stay and keep reading? To some extent, this might be the choice of colors for the page elements.

Color is believed to be one of the most powerful elements of design for web sites, direct mail, ads, and other marketing materials. It carries meaning through associations and/or your body physical response. Color associates can vary from country to country but in Western culture they are basically the same.

So don’t let (online) sellers affect your decision by showing you what you want to see. Let’s see how color choice may affect your shopping behavior and habits - for you to be able to buy with a cool head.

This is a guest post written by speakin_colors.
A wide variety of styles fall under the term gothic. A gothic wedding dress may be similar to a Renaissance dress, or it may be closer to the dark style of the underworld look of vampires and witches. It could also include some typical Celtic elements adapted to the gothic fashion, with rich fabrics and a variety of deep colours. Other designs could include a skin-tight black or red dress with a Victorian neckline or a plunging or lock-lace bodice, a goth corset with black ribbon detail, a long flowing skirt with lace or a webbed black hose.

Click on the image for the link.

Medieval Wedding Dresses
Gothic themed dresses may also incorporate the look of the Medieval ages. Though some Medieval dresses are in white, darker colours can be chosen for a darker and more dramatic design while still retaining the rich materials and delicate trims that are often featured in Medieval dresses. Typical distinguishing characteristics of the Medieval dresses are puff-sleeves and ruffled necklines.

The classic story and illustrations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are a testament to the talent and imagination of both L. Frank Baum and W.W. Denslow. Their use of color helped shape the tale of Dorothy, the Tin Woodmen, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion along with all the other characters in the land of Oz.

The regions have a color schema: blue for Munchkins, yellow for Winkies, red for Quadlings, green for the Emerald city, and (in works after the first) purple for the Gillikins, which region was also not named in the first book.(This contrasts with Kansas; Baum, describing it, used "gray" nine times in four paragraphs.)

Map of OZ

In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this is merely the favorite color, used for clothing and other man-made objects, and having some influence on their choice of crops, but the basic colors of the world are natural colors. The effect is less consistent in later works. In The Marvelous Land of Oz, the book states that everything in the land of the Gillikins is purple, including the plants and mud, and a character can see that he is leaving when the grass turns from purple to green, but it also describes pumpkins as orange and corn as green in that land. Baum, indeed, never used the color schema consistently; in many books, he alluded to the colors to orient the characters and readers to their location, and then did not refer to it again. His most common technique was to depict the man-made articles and flowers as the color of the country, leaving leaves, grass, and fruit their natural colors.

Colors of Oz

You may remember a few weeks ago in one of the weekly color roundups we mentioned an article about a recent study done by the University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business testing cognitive response in relation to color. With such an interesting and important findings, especially being related to color, I thought we should take a closer look at the findings.

In a yearlong study 600 participants were asked to complete a series of six cognitive tasks that required either attention to detail or creativity. The tasks were conducted on a computer screen with either a red, blue, or white background.

It was found that red increased detail oriented cognitive function such as proofreading and memory by 31% compared to blue which was found to double creative responses in brainstorming exercises compared to those with a red background.

The author of the study, Juliet Zhu of UBC’s Sauder School of Business, who conducted the study with Ravi Mehta, a doctoral student, attribute the findings to unconscious motivation in response to color, noting that these responses develop due to learned associations.