On the recommendation of COLOURlovers' member Caori, we're having a look at the color compositions of Alberto Cerriteño. Alberto is a Mexican illustrator and designer based in Portland, Oregon, whose expressive characters and desaturated palettes meld together to create a striking, beautiful and cohesive illustrative style.

Strongly inspired by urban vinyl toys, alternative cartoons, and the pop surrealism movement, Alberto Cerriteño has developed his own very personal technique and style, having always present a delicate hints of traditional Mexican artistic influences in his management of rich textures and decorative patterns. These contrast strikingly with the blending of desaturated colors and ink, sometimes featuring a vintage coffee finish.

While in recent years the covers of Esquire have featured a man in a suit or an at-least-half-naked woman, this wasn't always the trend. The art direction was first under the keen eye of Paul Rand from 1936-1941, followed by Henry Wolf from 1952-1958, and Robert Benton from 1958-1964, and during those times the magazine had many smart, creative, engaging and colorful covers.

Here is a selection of Esquire magazine covers between 1946 and 1971. The entire collection can be viewed on their site, and was brought to my attention by grain edit.

Color inspiration from the collection of American movie posters at polishposter.com.

Highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Japanese postcards from the early 1900's.

"The purpose of this project is to fill the information vacuum about the life and art of Stefan Kanchev. The quality of his works is so high that they are worthy to be shared with more people. Kanchev is the author of more than 1000 trade marks and symbols, 650 stamps, posters, post cards and envelopes, book covers, packaging and etc. It turned out that the gathering and processing of Kanchev’s art were very difficult tasks mainly because most of the works have sunk in the past. But the start is made. This project is a result of two years of hard work and doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. The work is not finished, actually it starts now and begins to evolve. The project is open to all who would like to contribute. Any information about Stefan Kanchev is welcome and would enrich the site. All signals of discrepancies or inaccuracies regarding project names, years or information are also welcome." - Trade Marks and Symbols of Stefan Kanchev

Book Worship, as the blog's creator Shawn Hazen puts it, "represents the obsessions of an atypical book collector."

Here, for your color inspiration is a selection from the site's collection of "graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s."

Playing cards were found in China as early as the 9th century during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when relatives of a princess played a "leaf game". The Tang writer Su E  stated that Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, played the leaf game with members of the Wei clan to pass the time. The Song Dynasty (960–1279) scholar Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) asserted that card games existed since the mid Tang Dynasty and associated their invention with the simultaneous development of using sheets or pages instead of paper rolls as a writing medium. A book called Yezi Gexi was allegedly written by a Tang era woman, and was commented on by Chinese writers of subsequent dynasties.

Ancient Chinese "money cards" have four "suits": coins (or cash), strings of coins (which may have been misinterpreted as sticks from crude drawings), myriads of strings, and tens of myriads. These were represented by ideograms, with numerals of 2–9 in the first three suits and numerals 1–9 in the "tens of myriads". Wilkinson suggests that the first cards may have been actual paper currency which were both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for. The designs on modern Mahjong tiles likely evolved from those earliest playing cards. However, it may be that the first deck of cards ever printed was a Chinese domino deck, in whose cards we can see all the 21 combinations of a pair of dice. In Kuei-t'ien-lu, a Chinese text redacted in the 11th century, we find that dominoes cards were printed during the Tang Dynasty, contemporary to the first printed books. The Chinese word pái (牌) is used to describe both paper cards and gaming tiles.

An Indian origin for playing cards has been suggested by the resemblance of symbols on some early European decks (traditional Sicilian cards, for example) to the ring, sword, cup, and baton classically depicted in the four hands of Indian statues.

Thanks to Focht for sharing this great set of matchbooks filled with inspiring colors. You can see the complete sets here, here and here.

From ultimate luxury to utilitarian dream to an example of excess and modern inefficiencies, the automobile has had a long history that is reflected in the color and design of the advertising developed for the industry over the years.

Here is a selection of vintage car ads for your color inspiration.

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An inspiring set of typewriter ribbon tins courtesy of UPPERCASE Gallery.