Happy Halloween! We hope this year's Halloween is a colorful one.

To make it a colorful Halloween here on COLOURlovers post your Halloween inspired patterns and palettes in the comments.

Halloween Patterns

This year, legendary milliner Stephen Jones will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his design house, Stephen Jones Millinery.  To commemorate the event, Antwerp's Mode Museum is hosting "Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion," a comprehensive exhibition of Jones' hats and a look at his career, which has included partnerships with Jean Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garçons, John Galliano, Christian Dior and Marc Jacobs.

[Clockwise from top left: KY, 2010; Blase, 2004; Northern Lights, 2002; The Cabin, 2008]

Today, we unite with blogs acorss the world to focus the conversation on one topic, Water.

We have plenty of love to give to those who are without a clean, reliable source of water (nearly one billion), and little patience for the polluting of our water supplies, especially contamination generated by the distressing acceptance of bottled 'designer' water.

Below you will find a few resources where you can find out more about our water woes, along with inspiration from some of our water related posts and water inspired patterns form the library. Add your color sense in the comments to keep the conversation going.

Resources:

Why Water? | Treehugger 1 & 2 | Charity: Water | Water.org | Unwater.org | Water Advocates

Inspiration

The Colors Of Shorebreak By Clark Little

Many of Prague's metro stations feature an identical design of repeating convex and concave shapes. Only the color scheme is different from station to station. The consistent texture and subltle color differences make each station quite stunning.

When it comes to matters of fashion here at COLOURlovers, member palettes and patterns are inspired by all sorts of items in a wardrobe--dresses, neckties, pants, handbags--the list goes on. But a few items see a little more love than the rest: suits, shirts, shoes and--as we'll see today--sweaters.

Whether called sweaters, jumpers, sweatshirts, pullovers, cardigans, jerseys or guernseys, sweaters have been an enduring aspect of popular fashion since the early 20th century. Of course, fishermen's sweaters--jerseys and guernseys--date to the 15th century, and athletes wore plenty of practical sweaters in the 19th century. But our idea of the everyday sweater had its start in American sportswear designs of the 1930s and 1940s. And since then, though its been given some new shapes (the recently ubiquitous open wrap cardigan, for one), the sweater has remained largely the same, both in commercial ideology and in popularity. A 1971 TIME magazine article on the sweater, at least, feels much like what a similar article would today:

[Neiman, photo by Chris Bergh; Abotanicity, photo by Melissa McClain]

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, summer is over. In the U.S., Labor Day has passed, school has started, the sun is setting sooner and we're getting ready to tuck away our white clothes and shoes until spring--well, at least that's what we've been told to do.

A suggested ban on white clothing and shoes after Labor Day, the first Monday of September, has been a rule of etiquette since the early 20th century. But is it really all that important by today's standards? Fashion--and even an etiquette expert or two--doesn't think so. In recent seasons, white has become an all-year hue. And a few other formerly fatal color combinations--brown and black, black and navy--have moved from fashion don't to fashion can-do territory, too.

[kiddy factory]

"For centuries, wearing white in the summer was simply a way to stay cool--like changing your dinner menu or putting slipcovers on the furniture," wrote TIME's Laura Fitzpatrick. In the early 1900s, clothing covered a lot more of the body than it does now, so summer whites, with their reflective qualities, made sense. But beyond practicality, white had a following in high society that may have led to the no-white rule.

"In the early 20th century, white was the uniform of choice for Americans well-to-do enough to decamp from their city digs to warmer climes for months at a time: light summer clothing provided a pleasing contrast to drabber urban life," Fitzpatrick wrote." Labor Day, celebrated in the U.S. on the first Monday of September, marked the traditional end of summer; the well-heeled vacationers would stow their summer duds and dust off their heavier, darker-colored fall clothing."

Of course, this theory is hotly contested by some--Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, told Fitzpatrick not every rule of etiquette has to be attributed to "snobbery." But whether the rule was meant to be snobby or not, the fashion world hasn't been ruled by it. And perhaps that's why etiquette queen Emily Post says it's OK to throw this rule out with the last of the summer barbecue leftovers.

[lisazain via Etsy]

After being considered a faux pas for so long, the black-and-brown combination--which has been given the go-ahead--is actually a fresh one. According to the Ralph Lauren Style Guide:  "When properly executed, the combination of black and brown is a very modern and sophisticated look that’s instantly elegant. Start by adding touches of brown via accessories: the hint of a leather belt beneath a black cardigan or suede boots under slim-fitting pants."

For women, Ladies' Home Journal says, "Pair rich brown wool trousers with a black turtleneck, or wear black shoes and hose with your brown skirt. For evening, try a brown cocktail dress instead of a black one." And a great tip for mixing-and-matching your shoes and handbags?" Try a deep red, hunter green or soft tan bag, or go for shoes in similar shades, all of which will work with your brown and black staples."

[Huzzah Vintage]

Navy and black make for another recently edgy combination--good news for navy lovers who may have had trouble matching shades of blue, or black lovers who have the same trouble matching blacks. This combination works a lot like black and brown in execution--try pairing a navy dress with black tights and shoes or skinny black pants with a navy blazer for a runway-worthy look.

Black shoes are also a good choice with a navy suit, though some advise a deep brown pair--GQ Style Guy Glenn O'Brien says to pick a pair at least as dark as your suit. But he also said, "Not long ago, I read a little manifesto in the catalog of the talented potter Jonathan Adler that stated, among other things: 'We believe colors can't clash.' I am coming to this view more and more."

Looks like others are, too.

Fearless color combinations from the library:

Header photo by timelessvintageshoes via Etsy.

Little things can make a big difference when it comes to first impressions... your business card is not only an opportunity to let potential clients, friends, squash partners, and recipe swap mates Know what your business is all about, but it is also an opportunity to let them in on a bit of your personality.

Below you will find some links that we hope will inspire you to be a little more colorful, or at least act as a reminder that it's time to reorder more business cards.

Find Your Inspiration

When it come to business cards no one does it quite like the Japanese. Take a look at the history and tradition of Meishi, and check out a few other links to see what that long tradition has come to look like in the contemporary world today: Japanese Business Cards | Meishi The Art of Introduction | Business Card for Tamiya | Printing Museum Tokyo

Maybe look back to the first widely used business cards also known as Trade Cards.

You could check out one of the the many businees card galleries right everywhere on the web: Card Observer |Cardonizer | Creattica | Card Gala

And blog roundups: One Man's Blog & creativebits

Try out some DIY ideas.

Or dive right in to flickr's business card sets & groups: Daily Poetic's Business Card Set | MOO Group | The Business Card | The Art of the Business Card

A Few Examples from the Aforementioned links

From Highlanders to hipsters, tartan--or, in a lot of cases outside of Scotland, plaid and check--has been one of fashion's favorite textiles for centuries.

"It's a cloth of duality," said Dr. Jonathan Faiers, author of Tartan: Textiles that Changed the World. "Its history is in the establishment--in clansmanship, the aristocracy and military forces, but because it's become the uniform of rugged masculinity it's also revisited in an ironic way--by subcultures such as grunge, punk and gay clones."

In that sociological sense, tartan is modern and traditional--a staple of Scottish clans and international fashion runways alike. From a color and pattern standpoint--important factors distinguishing one tartan from the next--it's a bold, eye-catching textile with the ability to declare one's family history as immediately as it can one's personal sense of style. It's certainly a favorite with pattern makers here at COLOURlovers.

Today, we're taking a look at how all of tartan's aspects come together.

[thardy1]

Fun thing! Courtesy of our bff The Internet, where nothing is lost, I just discovered that there are entire blogs dedicated to archiving vintage album art. Project Thirty Three, Groove is in the Art, and Stereo Sack are three such sites run by Seattle used vinyl shop, Jive Time Records. Everything from jazz to classical to psychedelic abound with a rainbow of colors and cheeky typography, all of which I am filing away as design inspiration fodder.

It's just amazing how well these have aged, design-wise.

When a social network like Twitter allows a user to select a theme to represent themselves in the digital world, that user is choosing to identify their digital persona with colors... And we wanted to look at who chooses what colors... If the world is made up of people and those people have a color preference... what then is the color of Texas? What color are mothers? What color are we?

By looking at the more than 1 Million people who have used our Themeleon tool to design their Twitter Profile in the past 3 months, we were able to paint a picture of the world connecting colors to locations and profile data. Below is a visual guide to what we found: What we noticed first was that a huge majority of people don't wander that far off from Twitter's default light blue colors... and then we went digging deeper.

*A little note regarding the "World vs. U.S." - We know the map is of the United States and does not represent the world, we only focused the map part of the infographic on the U.S. so we had a manageable amount of data to work with and geolocate. The keywords, male & female and video sections below all use data from around the world*

Click The Image Below for the High Res Version

A Colorful Tour of the Themeleon World

We took the colors from 100,000 profiles designed with Themeleon and geolocated them to the designers location. Although it is a little dark in this compressed video... Each location has a spectrum strip of colors... the more colors from a certain area, the taller the strip. (The US is well defined, Europe and East Asia... although you can see some outlines of other countries too.)

Colors of the Social Web from CHROMAom on Vimeo.

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