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

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

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

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 picture of English nouns is a map of 33,000 English nouns. Each tiny rectangle corresponds to a noun. The color of the rectangle has been assigned a color, based on an internet image search for that noun. The words are clustered so that similar words are near each other. Gallery. (Java required)
posted by jikel_morten on Aug 14, 2005 - 30 comments

Colour Rules of Thumb is a simple yet effective guide to the non black, white and red world. [via 43 Folders]
posted by riffola on Feb 16, 2005 - 13 comments

ColorCell: finding the most popular color combinations.
posted by Gyan on Aug 12, 2004 - 11 comments

The Virtual Colour Museum presents Colour Order Systems in Art and Science: "a complete cultural history of colour", including illustrated explanations of 59 colour theories from antiquity to modern time, plus the significance of colours in various cultural systems (click the small images to enlarge), and a "virtual colour-space" dedicated to illustrating the spherical colour system construction of early 19th century painter Philipp Otto Runge. Walk this way >>
posted by taz on Nov 9, 2003 - 4 comments

exploring color ... online utility to help room designers (and maybe even web designers) choose the right color for their project.
posted by crunchland on Oct 24, 2003 - 13 comments

Vischeck's colour vision model allows you to simulate how the world looks to people with various sorts of colour deficiency. You can check a single image, or webpage, or just download it. Here's a temporary snapshot of MeFi after being vischecked.
posted by riffola on Apr 16, 2002 - 15 comments

Are you seeing the world differently? You may be suffering from synesthesia, a rare condition that allows an individual to perceive symbols in color. Someone who has synesthesia will read a newspaper in multitudinous colors, often perceiving a color change within particular syllables. In one case reported in this article, a man overhead a conversation in Korean, only to have his mind inundated with colors, despite being unable to understand the words. Rare condition or a state of sensory cognition to come?
posted by ed on Mar 19, 2002 - 48 comments

"Beige. I think I'll paint the universe beige." Remember those arguments we had about the exact shade of turquoise the universe was supposed to be? Umm, computer glitch, sorry. "Fairchild realized the software Glazebrook was using actually took a slightly pinky looking colour as white. 'There was a huge green shift due to the erroneous white point,' he says."
posted by maudlin on Mar 7, 2002 - 8 comments

And you thought it was #006699.
posted by obiwanwasabi on Jan 10, 2002 - 24 comments

Adopt a color let's you name a colour for $25. Would be great to have MeFi Blue, Zeldman Orange, Kottke Yellow as standard colour names. Would make a good last minute christmas gift for a friend who's got a site. [via Fairvue]
posted by riffola on Dec 22, 2000 - 13 comments

Death of the Websafe Color Palette? Bring some coffee, these people bring a lot of math to their idea.
posted by Brilliantcrank on Sep 8, 2000 - 14 comments

The CAUS has a page with their predictions on popular colors for 1999. I don't know about you, but I'd say there's far too many pastels in the mix, and the dark-gray/greenish-gray has been played out by Martha Stewart/Pottery Barn/Crate&Barrel crowd already.
posted by mathowie on Oct 15, 1999 - 0 comments