After seeing the packaging design for Highland Park 50 year old it made me think back to the days that I don't actually have any memories of; the days when there wasn't a bunch of goofy stuff on a whiskey bottle and all you had was good clean glass color and simple type. Lucky for us, there are sites like Antique Bottles so we can all have a look back and find a little color inspiration. We're also checking in with current popular brands and their label colors and designs. Drink up, cheers!

Antique Bottles

It seems that long before Red Bull, Radio Stations and unknown hip-hop artists started visually polluting our streets with promotional vehicle wraps, Volkswagen was were already driving down a similar road, but one that was designed quite a bit better. In fact, it was a big enough part of VW's business that they produced dealer books to showcase this very promotional tool. Today we get a look at some fantastic scans from a VW spilt-window logo bus dealer book.

Found at CarType and generously collected and shared by VintageBus, here for our color inspiration are Vintage VW Spit-window logo buses. You can see the complete book (60 pages total) at CarType, and even more inspiration can be found at what is probably the best VW bus resource on the web, VintageBus.

Today we look at an interview with the artist Francisca Prieto from Insideout, take a tour of Dave Chihuly's boat house with shelterrific, ponder the visualizations of race and ethnicity in cities across the U.S. by Eric Fischer, and take a step back with vintage inspired print series by Blue Art Studio.

Interviews

Francisca Prieto

[Insideout]

Have you always been creative, even when you were a child?
When I was little, I asked for the same birthday present over and over again: the Staedtler box of 40 felt tip pens; and instead of writing in my diary, I would create a different pattern for every day of the year. I am not sure if that means that I was quite naturally creative, or if it was a good exercise to become creative.

Studio Tour

Dave Chihuly's Boat House

[shelterrific]

Infographics

by Eric Fischer

[Race & Ethnicity]

"I was astounded by Bill Rankin's map of Chicago's racial and ethnic divides and wanted to see what other cities looked like mapped the same way. To match his map, Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000. Base map © OpenStreetMap, CC-BY-SA"

Posters

by Blue Art Studio

Header Inspiration

Color Warp by COLOURlover mavel

[Color Forum]

Much loved the world over, Ed Emberley has been inspiring illustrators, young and old, since the 1970s. Either with crayon and a coloring book, or a more formal artistic approach, his incredible influence is clear.

Historically interesting and well designed letterheads collected on Leterheady make up today's color inspiration. Leterheady was started by Shaun Usher, and is an "online homage to offline correspondence; specifically letters. However, at Letterheady they don't care about the letter's content. Just its design."

Walt Disney

Tonight Show with Johnny Carson

Not many of us have the luxury of jetting around the world, but hey...a girl can dream, right? And what better way to fuel the fantasy of international travel than by displaying a vintage map in your home! Old maps come in a multitude of varieties (world maps, state maps, maps of countries, topographic maps, climate maps, economic resource maps, political maps, treasure maps!) and they can be found in a wide range of styles and conditions.

(Desire To Inspire, etsy, eBay, eBay)

As Benefit of  the Doubt was wrapping up his month of posts focused on color in film he brought to our attention this nice little list of "The Best Uses of Color in Film, Ever, Both Foreign and Domestic" put together by the great Martin Scorsese. The list includes 1o american and 10 foreign films that Scorsese believes demonstrate a masterful use of light and color.

"Films use light and color to tell a story in a special narrative way, which delivers a strong emotional and intellectual impact on the viewer," Scorsese said. "That made a very strong impression on me and has affected how I try to use color in all of my films."

The lists were the idea of Philips Electronics, which was looking for a way to promote its Ambilight FlatTV displays.

Here are the top ten English language films in alphabetical order with a little palette love:

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Prague based designer Pavel Fuksa (Jergot+Gotroch) created 178 original vintage inspired matchbooks for a music video by Navigators. As you can see, the series is full of inspiring palettes.

For your inspiration: vintage motel interiors from the 50's & 60's. All images are kindly shared by Roadside Pictures.

"Scientists have found evidence of some of the original coloration of a dinosaur that lived about 125 million years ago, showing that it had rings of orange-brown bristly feathers around its tail."

Color has long been something that scientist thought would never be known about the dinosaurs. Since only hard tissues tend to be preserved in fossil records there was little hope in the scientific community that any of the colorful softer tissues would ever be studied. And without those how could we ever know what color palette any of these incredible creatures displayed. The answer came in a feather.

Recently discovered feathered dinosaurs held the key to our first look at color. Feathers, unlike soft tissue, are made of tough proteins and hold up much better. Unfortunately these fossilized feathers don't preserve the color they once had but rather look much like any other fossil.

Sinosauropteryx From wiki. See other artist renditions based on these findings here.

"When you look at the feathers, you don't know what the colors were. The feathers are a mixture of brownish colors," says Benton (paleontologist Mike Benton at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom). "They're just preserved either as sort of dirty, whitish, beige kind of color and a kind of darker, equally dirty kind of brownish color. "