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Why is the world losing color?

(www.culture-critic.com)
322 points trevin | 3 comments | | HN request time: 1.051s | source
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crazygringo ◴[] No.43558560[source]
It's not "losing" color.

At periods when technology resulted in new color possibilities, people went overboard with color. Make all the things colorful!! Think of the technicolor sixties. And we can go back in history and see the same thing with new clothing pigments, new paint pigments.

But when everything is colorful, nothing stands out. Everything being colorful is as monotonous as everything being, well, monotone.

Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents. Don't paint a whole room green -- have a gorgeous green plant that stands out all the more against its neutral background. Don't paint a whole wall orange -- have a beautiful orange-hued piece of art on the wall. It's just more tasteful to use color as one element, along with size, shape, texture, and so forth. Making it the main element in everything is just overdoing it. It's bad design.

I don't want constant "riotous color", as the article puts it, in my home, or my workplace, or while I'm driving. It's visually exhausting.

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delichon ◴[] No.43558663[source]
> It's visually exhausting.

This. It's about managing stimulation levels and contrast. If the environment is continually shouting at you it's hard to hear the whispers, where the meaning is.

I bet one of those color comparison graphs of the average website in 1998 through today would show the same trend. I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.

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1. elmomle ◴[] No.43558909[source]
> I wish the inflationary trend in linguistic overstatement did the same.

Nowadays literally everything I read is the most egregious overstatement I've ever seen.

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2. ◴[] No.43559015[source]
3. the__alchemist ◴[] No.43559171[source]
Love the phrasing. I found myself in the past few days getting in a pair of disputes in HN comments that may have boiled down reading the exaggerated adjectives literally, when the authors may not have intended that.