[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01RZS5RJJyU]
Color walk at Cirque du Soleil. 
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5th July: Kate's Color Quiz
Nexium became the most heavily advertised drug in the United States with ads that featured what color? Answer »
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Meet the Color Mavens
Kate Smith
"As a professional color expert, trend forecaster, engaging speaker and chief color maven, I work with corporate clients and buiness owners on using color to drive sales and elicit a favorable response to their products, their brands, and their marketing messages." more...
Julie Hoylen
"Born with a natural sense of style, Julie is a fashion stylist and consultant working in the New York City area. Julie's professional experience in both the fashion and music industries has allowed her to develop a unique perspective on personal style that keeps her clients turning to her when" more...Featured Site
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Trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. (more…)
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Color: Messages & Meanings
Make effective, unique and credible color choices
Based on research and filled with hundreds of color combinations and illustrations, Color: Messages & Meanings presents color expert, Leatrice Eiseman’s insights on color and emotion, and addresses how best to integrate these qualities into your work, insuring your intended message is communicated.
OKI Printing Solutions, a company specializing in printing solutions, polled 100 weight loss club members last month to test a theory that health-conscious buyers are more likely to be drawn to foods in blue wrapping.
Survey results: 76% of those shown two brands of breakfast cereal, orange juice and a yogurt drink believed the blue packaged products to be the healthier choice.
In their press release, OKI Printing Solution quoted color psychologist Angela Wright. “The 76 per cent agreement rate comes as no surprise to me. Blue is not a natural food colour, however it can be wisely used in the marketing of low-fat foods as it encourages people to eat less,” she said.
“Blue is the colour of the mind and evokes a sense of responsibility, tending to encourage us to be on our best behaviour so unconsciously consumers believe the product is lower in fat than other brands,” she added.
ComputerWorld.com currently features a story “Sexy Machines — Yeah Baby!” that reveals that even when it comes to IT system design it isn’t just about the technology.
From Hewlett-Packard Co.’s BMW inspired designs to Sun Microsystems designs reminiscent of rockin’ stereo systems these manufactures know that even for enterprise-class IT system design you need to speak the “design language” of color and shape.
From the article:
You might even be surprised where the ideas for those LED-lit, honeycomb-vented, stylized aluminum boxes came from and just how much impact those slick designs have on your decision to fork out thousands of dollars on even the most expensive mainframes, servers and PCs. Even those flashy exterior lights on your hard disk drives have a measure of psychology behind them because manufacturers know certain bright colors evoke succinct messages in the mind of a techie.
George Daniels, the group manager at HP’s Enterprise Design and Usability Center, learned just how important design language can be when, not long ago, he chose to design a blue universal latch hood for a server line. The color blue erroneously screamed to corporate IT workers “turn this off before opening” even though the cover had nothing to do with the operation of the machine. After receiving user complaints from IT admins who’d been shutting down servers to open the hood, Daniels and his team of eight engineers quickly changed the color to HP’s standard port (purple), which tells a user, “I’m hot-swappable.” The example shows how critical computer design, right down to the color, is in providing IT workers visual signals to do their jobs.
See a slide show of the latest designs and read the rest of the article…
I keep an eye on the science and research publications to see what may be on the horizon for color in the future.
Even if I don’t fully understand the impact of the latest reserch it still sparks my imagination and opens my mind to new possiblities for the future as well as for using the materials available to me today.
This week Chemical Technology: A magazine highlighting the latest applications and technological aspects of research across the chemical sciences reports:
A simple process for preparing light-emitting layers of silica with wide colour variation has been developed by Italian scientists.
The promise of preparing white light emitting materials for flat displays stimulated a team led by Gianluca Accorsi of National Research Council, Bologna, to develop luminescent hybrid layers.
Rsearchers are looking at this technolgy for “colour tunable luminescent devices” and with so many interesting developments such as this one coming about it’s easy to envision color being used in new ways and across many new applications.
Maybe before long we’ll be painting our rooms with light rather than pigment or using light and color in other ways we’ve only dreamed of in the past.
The picture is from Chemical Technology and you can read the full article here.
If you read our feature A Rainbow of Carrots you already know that carrots weren’t always orange.
In the most recent BrandFlash video Martin Lindstrom points out that while today we all recognize carrots as being orange few people know or remember the place where it was created. The video titled “Color Branding the Carrot: A Netherlands’ ‘How Not to’ Story” is available to be viewed online at Adverting Age.
Think about all of the energy your company puts into branding. Will it be remembered?
Color insights for your business —brands, products, packaging— plus the lastest color trends, design influences and innovations.
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