A wonderfully colorful community southeast of Moscow in Russia has taken color love to a whole new level. The Ramenskoye Apartments are by far the most colorful apartments we've ever seen, and while these apartments have made their rounds on the web... we couldn't help but bring some attention to them again.
Original Images by sturman

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Shopping is all about choice, and finding exactly what you want feels great, but with retail stores trying to cater to too many needs or wants, things can become a bit generic -- or worse -- too specific. Ask any shoe enthusiast in your social circle, and they'll say footwear is the worst, and seems like shoe companies asked their friends, too, as now a few of those companies are seeking to bridge the gap between their products and their customers through customisation.

Usually for just a bit more than the typical cost of a pair, companies Nike, Vans, and Converse have stepped up with a customisation system on their respective websites. After selecting a desired style and your shoe size, a selection of colours is made available to put almost anywhere on the shoe.

Matchmaker

Playing with Converse's custom tool was the most fun for me, as there were so many options to choose from in both colour and section of the shoe. Having a two-tone shoe never seemed like a better idea.

 
Vans supply a custom skate shoe and their popular slip-on shoe while Nike supplies their iD running shoe.

Whatever your style -- casual or athletic -- you certainly have your choices laid out for you, and it just makes matching so much smoother.

Hair colouring is a style choice as old as four-thousand years ago, as Assyrian herbals have been found dating back to 2177 BC. Seemingly because women feared going grey before 'their time,' hair colouring has carried itself into our time for a number of reasons.

Unnatural Color

A method to remove the yellowness of grey hair popularised in the 1950s was such that applying too much would turn the hair blue, giving way to the trend of 'blue haired old ladies,' or 'blue hairs.' Blue hair is one of the few colours that don't occur naturally among humans and other mammals, yet it surfaced so often because of an eagerness to look younger and the debacle of grey-removing blue rinse.

Knitters truly are color lovers. These aren't your average socks... these wonderfully colorful knit socks show a wide variety of the endless possibilities for crafty knitters.

Title photo by paperfacets

A Collection of 20 Colorful Knit Socks

Falling in Love Socks   by tua bella Started 2/10/07, completed 3/6/07, but I wasn't working very much on them. The first sock went fast. I dawdled on the second. Pattern here. The yarn is from KnitPicks, and was dyed specially for me by my awesome Secret Pal, Rachel. The stripes turned out perfectly!

Feeling a little stuck in the box? Might I suggest a pair of stylish bird scissors? Pylones is a store of ordinary items done extraordinarily, and it just might change every one of your preconceived notions concerning what kitchen utensils and office supplies should be. Bringing fun and funk together, psychedelic toasters are about the tamest of all the hand-painted products in-store and online.

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With store locations only in Paris and New York City, I remember stepping into the one on Spring Street in Manhattan and feeling like a five-year-old again.

From as early as the 1960s, colour and lights have been brought together in unconventional ways to the home. The defining product of the time was the lava lamp, and they find their ways into homes even today with all sorts of bases and tops to accommodate the tastes of the homes in which they appear. The driving force behind lava lamps, Mathmos, has become a radiant source for colour.

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Quiet Reminders

Today, light and colour come together in all new and exciting ways. It seems like everything with a circuit board has LEDs in it somewhere. An array of colours can tell you if something is charged completely, if it's on or simply has power, and so on. These subtle signals can tell us a number of things. With so much of our daily lives revolving around tiny coloured lights, it makes me all the more glad that Mathmos has taken ambient light to a new level.

Every time I hear "the adults" of my family talk about video games, which is usually after one of my cousins and I mention something, they seem to always loop back to, "Wow, remember pong? We used to play that for hours." And while controllers have seemingly become just more complicated and the games just the same, what's been interesting to watch is the evolution of graphics over gameplay, specifically with Nintendo, the longest running console manufacturer.

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With the start of the (usually) exciting summer movie season, records have already been broken. Again. With films like Spiderman 3 and Shrek the Third competing, ticket sales have seen all sorts of exciting new heights.

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What we're going to look at today are the colours used in five posters of movies that are playing now.

Being half red, many of the characteristics of red are found in pink. A warm colour, pink is welcoming, and stands for romance and passion. Paired with red, and sometimes white, pink is the colour of St. Valentine's Day, a holiday based on showing love to the people around you.

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Pink is also a delicate colour. Perceived as feminine in the United States, it is also the colour of innocence and purity in Japanese culture. I always associate pink with spring, and most of the flowers that bloom, like the cherry blossoms. In giving pink flowers, the general sentiment is that of gratitude and friendship, an appreciation for another person over all.

Connotations of pink from Design Meltdown: Passion, romance, love, innocence, soothing, relaxing, fresh, sensuous, restful, tranquilizing, marriage, healthy, happy, sweet, nice, playful, good health, life, sexuality, purity, gratitude, appreciation, feminine, fun, free.

Special to HGTV.com, Mark McCauley lays out ten rules for using colour, the first of which interests me most: the 60-30-10 rule. Those three numbers relate to percentages of colour that will make for the most aesthetically appealing. The percentages are shown in room photographs, but McCauley makes mention of using that same idea if wearing a suit, and I dare to think it applies with most any other combination of clothing. McCauley visits other design and coordination concepts, such as colour schemes, remembering that using black is okay, using colours from patterns, drawing from nature, and bringing the colours home before you buy them.

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The read the complete ten colour basics, visit the HGTV site, and bring back your colour palettes following one of the basic rules.

See you when I get back home.