Something vivid and sweet for Friday:
Liz Wolfe takes beautiful photographs.
Cool Hunting interviews Liz.
posted by isopraxis on Oct 23, 2009 - 30 comments

Rachell Sumpter takes color and detail to the extreme in her art exhibits, reminiscent of Fantasia in a sense. Sumpter is developing quite the portfolio as demonstrated at the Richard Heller Gallery. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Oct 22, 2009 - 9 comments

Ah, Fashion. The shows. [more inside]
posted by kathrineg on Sep 15, 2009 - 35 comments

After receiving complains from upset parents, FEMA took the PDF coloring book "A Scary Thing Happened" offline, and now the story is spinning around the internet. Created by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team in 2003 as a tool for children to use with a responsible parent or adult to help cope with the disaster, the book has been used with children who have experienced disasters related to Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, floods and even the Interstate 35 bridge collapse, to name a few instances. There have even been international requests from the Australian Red Cross to use the coloring book as a model to aid Australian children. Looking for more than the offending page? The Smoking Gun has made the original PDF available, and FEMA still has three other coloring books online. (More coloring book fun inside) [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Apr 30, 2009 - 43 comments

Holi - The Festival of Colors on the Big Picture. More about Holi. What else can you do on Holi? [pre vious ly]
posted by not_on_display on Mar 13, 2009 - 19 comments

14 large color photos from the Farm Security Administration. [more inside]
posted by Happy Dave on Mar 13, 2009 - 32 comments

Postcards from Israel (or stamps, anyway). COLOURlovers (previously) has posted a set of color palettes drawn from designer and blogger Karen Horton's flickr collection of vintage Israeli postage stamps. [more inside]
posted by sarabeth on Mar 2, 2009 - 3 comments

The value of limits, expressed through the process of a four-year-old making a painting. [more inside]
posted by carbide on Jan 14, 2009 - 14 comments

The beautiful vintage photos of three Belgian friends - a doctor, a painter, and accountant - who shared their experiments in color photography from 1907 to 1920. (via The Wonderland of Mia Mäkilä) [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive on Dec 26, 2008 - 17 comments

The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air "Moreover, this book is written for all those who love Nature; for the young people going out into the wide world and gathering together round the camp-fire; for the painter who admires but does not understand the light and colour of the landscape; for those living in the country; for all who delight in travelling; and also for town-dwellers, for whom, even in the noise and clamour of our dark streets, the manifestations of Nature remain." - Marcel Minnaert [more inside]
posted by jquinby on Dec 23, 2008 - 17 comments

Unscrambling an army of colours, reports The Guardian on the BBC's forthcoming screening of a colour-restored episode of the WWII sitcom Dad's Army. Not seen for 40 years and lost in its original PAL video colour format, it existed only as an archive on 16mm b&w film. However, the Colour Recovery Working Group found a way to recover the colour information from "chroma dots": pattern artefacts on the b&w representing unfiltered colour signal. Techie details here and here.
posted by raygirvan on Dec 11, 2008 - 7 comments

Dominoes Made of Dominoes Awesome and very chromatically beautiful. Watch for the hold-outs that refuse to collapse.
posted by axltea on Sep 24, 2008 - 21 comments

How's your hues? Test your color hue ability with this online test. Horizontally drag 'n' drop the squares in the correct hue order.
posted by zardoz on Sep 16, 2008 - 220 comments

The "terminator" is the dividing line between day and night as seen from on high. This shadow line is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Sep 16, 2008 - 44 comments

Color Is Relative, pretty and interesting eye candy created by Gabriel Mott, is a website dedicated to showing luminosity achieved through simple color combinations. On the site, the image is interactive. By moving the mouse over a single swatch the background color of the page will change to the same color. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Aug 29, 2008 - 13 comments

10 Incredible Ancient Oases.
posted by homunculus on Aug 24, 2008 - 21 comments

Goethe's Theory of Colors: example of a "research style" that has "played a crucial role in the history of physics", or "tedious heap of mythical, uninformed or impressionistic color anecdotes"? Learn more about "Goethian science", then miss the point entirely by viewing a PDF recreating his experiments photographically, or playing with his triangle online. [more inside]
posted by No-sword on Aug 15, 2008 - 16 comments

Keith Thorne has stunningly colored pictures of decaying urban spaces on his Flickr stream, including some taken at an abandoned German military hospital that once treated Adolf Hitler. A few pictures feature himself. Via.
posted by Hollow on Aug 4, 2008 - 26 comments

Meet Adolf Hitler. Godwin! Look right into Stalin's eyes. 350 people from the dictator's country, Photoshopped together to create eerily alive photographs. (via kottke, via conscientious) [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Aug 1, 2008 - 41 comments

How do things look to colorblind people? Colour Lovers (Prev: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - all more useful to those who aren't colorblind) offers some popular websites and iconic art, As Seen By The Color Blind. Luckily humans are smart and have created technology like the Color Blind Web Page Filter. Prev. Wiki.
posted by allkindsoftime on Jul 25, 2008 - 36 comments

Colorful Allusions
Though printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In these rebus-style puzzles, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes.
posted by carsonb on Jun 11, 2008 - 8 comments

If you've ever wanted to peel back the corners of your browser window again and again to reveal different colors, then colorflip is for you.
posted by hydrophonic on May 19, 2008 - 29 comments

Interesting photos and film (mpg | avi) on a site that doesn't give context.
posted by dobbs on Apr 4, 2008 - 12 comments

ABC3D is an elegant pop-up book featuring the letters of the alphabet. Plus: a flip book that generates a rainbow.
posted by tepidmonkey on Mar 24, 2008 - 16 comments

Brilliant bookshelves by color. What's that? You can't find The Scarlet Letter? Did you look under lipstick red? [more inside]
posted by thebellafonte on Mar 4, 2008 - 54 comments

Lost America is a purdy website featuring night photography of ghost towns, urban exploration, decommissioned military facilities, airplane graveyards, and other roadside abandonments of the American west.
posted by dhammond on Mar 2, 2008 - 22 comments

"What is the sound of color? We asked that question of 5 musicians. We assigned each musician a different color. They wrote 5 tracks. We gave the colors and tracks that inspired them to 5 directors." The Sound of Color contains the songs and videos that were created. The site and free downloads are only available through March 15. (Via Carolina Vigna-Marú) [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive on Feb 18, 2008 - 23 comments

Essential Video Resources - primers, guides and links for the video editor and technician [more inside]
posted by Gyan on Dec 14, 2007 - 6 comments

Using Color In Information Display Graphics - a resource from NASA, "intended to help designers who are not color experts find usable color designs" [via] [more inside]
posted by Gyan on Oct 4, 2007 - 11 comments

The Color of Top Grossing Movies. A movie’s theatrical poster is only a very small part of the larger marketing and hype machine that turns movies into spectacular blockbusters, but as part of a whole, they are fairly representative of the “image” of any given movie. So, as an exercise in color trends, and to see if any significant pattern emerged, I decided to break down the colors of 25 posters — the top 5 of each MPAA category.
posted by brain_drain on Sep 12, 2007 - 35 comments

"Being a typical guy, I have no clue what the colors Lavender and Mauve look like. You can show me Indigo and I won't know if it's more like Violet or Purple. So I made this little app, Name That Color, where you can create a color on the screen (or copy-paste CSS hex# color) and find out the name of the closest matching color." Innovated by MeFite chime.
posted by nickyskye on Sep 7, 2007 - 68 comments

DIY business card holders from paint chips from industrial designer Aaron Tang at designverb, step by step.
posted by taz on Aug 20, 2007 - 10 comments

It's Friday, time to relax and look at pretty pictures [maybe nsfw in the banner ads]
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Jul 27, 2007 - 20 comments

Pie charts that represent the proportional amount of color in each country's national flag. Similar to this (previously), only not as pointed.
posted by tepidmonkey on May 28, 2007 - 33 comments

Need another ridiculous way to browse Flickr? Try the Flickr Color Selectr!
posted by Citizen Premier on May 14, 2007 - 13 comments

Everyone needs more Kuler. There a lot of color pickers out there...and I generally like all of them...but Kuler takes things a step further by making a community of color and color themes. Of course it's tied with their products but that doesn't distract from the usefulness of this free online application. It is also a beautifully designed website both in form and function.
posted by rmmcclay on Apr 9, 2007 - 14 comments

Hacking the Senses: The brain is far more plastic than we commonly realize. Presenting new 'senses' via the old inputs works extremely well, to the point that long-term volunteers are a little lost without their new abilities to feel magnetic north or absolute orientation. Tasting direction; feeling pictures. Fascinating stuff. In a loosely related article, genetically modified mice are able to see the full color range visible to humans, even though the last natural mouse able to see this way died out a hundred million years ago. Add the new sensors, and the brain reconfigures. [via]
posted by Malor on Apr 5, 2007 - 68 comments

Finally, you can test the 'blondes have more fun' theory completely. Hair color for your "betty".
posted by graventy on Nov 4, 2006 - 70 comments

Here are some alternative therapies you may not have considered. Animal assisted therapy promotes the healing benefits of the animal-human bond. Biblical Therapy provides treatment based on biblical "truths" to strengthen your relationship with Jesus. Color therapy has nothing to do with Spike Lee, and everything to do with your favorite shirt. With Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) you can replace years of therapy with one 90 minute session where you learn to roll your eyes the right way. Feng Shui suggests maybe it's not you, it's your crummy crib. Or perhaps you simply don't get enough Orgone. Doesn't it make you want to scream?
posted by ubiquity on Sep 5, 2006 - 21 comments

Colour Player: at last, you can organize your music by its color.
posted by signal on Aug 29, 2006 - 12 comments

Color of My Sound. Choose a color of a sound or song and see how others have voted with their comments. Add your own audio files. (more)
posted by nickyskye on Aug 22, 2006 - 7 comments

Reverse Color Blindness Test "normal vision humans have a lower degree of color contrast detection in the red spectrum. A colorblind person shouldn't be burdened by that lowered contrast sensitivity and should be able to see the object immediately by picking out the change in contrast at the objects edges" A small oddity that takes but a few seconds of time. (via The Presurfer)
posted by caddis on Jun 28, 2006 - 53 comments

i began cataloging the colors, and put the color list on the web. over time, the paint catalog turned into a web site.
posted by ijoshua on Jun 27, 2006 - 7 comments

Color theory is demonstrated before your very eyes, inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Itten, Joseph Albers, Marcel Duchamp and George Jetson. yes it's the COLORBOT© Color Harmonizer-Discorder. via dataisnature
posted by signal on Jun 27, 2006 - 26 comments

The 2006 winners and nominees in the first International Color Awards offers a broad sampling of work from some of the world's finest professional and amateur color photographers. View more from Erwin Olaf, Photographer of the Year in the professional category.
posted by madamjujujive on Jun 10, 2006 - 9 comments

Spanish Castle Magic. Stare at the dot in the center of the image for 30 seconds, then mouseover the picture. Don't shift your glance, because until you do the picture will appear to be in color, despite the fact that it's in black & white.
posted by jonson on Jun 7, 2006 - 67 comments

ColorWhore. A directory of nice colors.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket on Jun 6, 2006 - 21 comments

Digital Artform is a fascinating resource for those interested in 3D graphics, digital painting, and the like. How about turning 2D stills into 3D animations, the truth about motion blur and colour mixing, or outlines in action? Also, a recipe for making your own Viewmaster reels, and the politics of colour saturation.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jan 27, 2006 - 13 comments

A rabbi, some snails, the color purple, and a 1,500 year old mystery. By puzzling through various sources, a group of researchers and religious scholars think they have found in the mollusk Murex trunculus the source of a purplish dye that was used in ancient Jewish ceremonies over a millennia and a half ago. Murex has been used for the last 3,600 years to make Imperial or Tyrian Purple, a key color in the ancient world. There are many other pigments with their own interesting stories as well.
posted by blahblahblah on Dec 20, 2005 - 15 comments

Bound For Glory: Color Photographs from the FSA The first major exhibition of The little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II. --- Taken from when Kodachrome Film was just being developed, the pictures document life in color during the depresssion era US. We're so used to seeing FSA photos in black and white; seeing them in color is just surreal.
posted by virga on Dec 13, 2005 - 52 comments