While we might all be familiar with the condition of color blindness, it's not the only condition related to color. Another, and maybe less familiar, or at least, more complicated, is a form of Synesthesia where your brain associates certain colors with letters and numbers called Grapheme-color Synesthesia.

One of our very own COLOUR lovers,  deedee914, has this very condition, and as an artist & designer the condition has given her a unique perspective on color and it's uses in her work. I got a chance to talk with deedee about her personal snyesthesia map, her struggle to stick with brand standards, and how this conditions impacts her and her work on a daily basis.

deedee914's map (click on image to see it full size)

About deedee914: I have a condition called Synesthesia that some define as a sort of autism or a condition where your brain experiences correspondences between sound, colour, letter or numbers. My particular case is one in which my brain maps certain colours to certain numbers and letters. Several famous artists both musical, visual arts, and even literary geniuses have documented cases or even written about their experiences. As a kid, I had an incredibly difficult time learning to use those magnetic plastic letters and numbers. The colour of the plastic never properly corresponded to the right letter or number so I gave up using them as early learning devices.

Hello COLOURlovers, I wanted to send you some new year wishes and to look back on a very interesting 12 months.  COLOURlovers has grown a lot in the last year, enjoyed some very nice praise and has survived through some tough economic times.  Thank you for sharing the love and for helping make this site such a creative, supportive and strong community.

Some Stats from 2008:

1,012,479 Colors Named
429,261 Palettes Added
321,434 Patterns Added
954,460 Comments Posted
7.5 Million visitors from around the world came to COLOURlovers.

Some of the Recognition We Received in 2008:

TIME's Top 50 Sites of 2008

Webby Awards: Best Community Site Nominee (2nd Year in a Row)

Webvisionary Awards: Best of Show, Best Community, Best Web Application

Most Popular Blog Posts of 2008:

As Seen By The Color Blind
1,000 (Colorful) Places to See Before You Die
All 120 Crayon Names, Color Codes and Fun Facts
Nudibranchs, The Most Colorful Creatures in the World
50 Colorful Wallpapers: Full Spectrum Love
Unusual Color Wheels Found in Life and Art
The Color of Money from Around the World

Hard Times Ahead

This will be a tough year for websites that survive on ad income.  We've already seen a friend & fellow creative community, JPG magazine say goodbye. We're aware of the pain this financial crunch will put us in as we already limit the amount of money we try and squeeze out of your eyeballs.  You can support COLOURlovers and help us continue to build this great community by becoming a sponsor, and continuing to share the color love with your friends and family.

It is a challenge for the small team that runs this site to keep it growing and evolving as fast as our great members would like, but we hope some partnerships get realized early in the new year which will allow us to keep the limited amount of quality advertising we have on the site, and still get the resources we need to continue making COLOURlovers all that it can be.  I have some very big plans and with your help I can see this site being an even more amazing resource for anyone looking for a bit of color inspiration... or just a little love.

A Year Filled with COLOURlove

For those keeping track, this is usually the time of year we release a new version of the COLOURlovers site... but because of the way things have been going economically, we had to push version 4 of the site off a bit... perhaps we'll get it all ready for a Valentines Day COLOURlove-Fest.

We'll continue to work hard adding in new features to the site and promise to give you some big developments in 2009.  It's going to be a big challenge to give you all what we have planned, but I promise that if you keep up your wonderful support and don't stop sharing the love... we'll keep striving to make this the best creative place on the internet.

To another wonderful year together. Happy COLOURloving.  Thank you.

-Darius (COLOURlover)

Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.

Products

Kirk Originals

kirkoriginals.com

Ever since they converted an old sewing machine into a glass cutter back in 1919 Kirk Originals has been creating some of the most colorful eyeglasses on the market.

The color for today is blue! Blue is beautiful, bold, calm and vivid. It comes in a variety of shades. My favorite is turquoise along with navy, what is your favorite shade of blue?

Click on the image for the link

A nice write up about the latest wallpaper trends and tips on how to best incorporate them into your home or office by House to Home.

Archive designs

Wallpapers taken from the archives are historic but far from old-fashioned. Follow our tips to make a traditional archive-print wallpaper work beautifully in your home.

• You don’t have to live in an old house for these wallpapers to work, but, for best effect, choose a design that suits the scale of your home. For example, the small florals typical of the 1930s can look lost in a high-ceilinged room, while heavily patterned Victorian prints can overwhelm a small or low-ceilinged space.

• To make a beautiful wallcovering the focus of the room, pick out key colours from the design and repeat them in plain fabrics and painted woodwork.

• To mix in other prints without outshining the wallpaper, stick to a limited colour palette. Alternatively, choose another print from the same collection – they’re grouped to co-ordinate, so the hard work’s been done for you.

• If you like an eclectic look, you can team an archive wallpaper with modern furniture, but echo the design – for example, a pattern with gentle curves will look better with furniture in curved shapes.

• If you want to find a paint that matches the tones used in an archive wallpaper, look at heritage and period paint collections.

Geometrics

Love geometric wallpaper? Use it to create a fabulous look with these simple rules.

The folks over at worldlabel.com had an idea to create an easy way for people to create their own cd and address labels using palettes geometric patterns and color palettes, and asked the members here at COLOURlovers to contribute designs for an exhibition. Here's what they had to say about worldlabels.com and the COLOURlovers Exhibition:

This whole exhibition idea started when one of the employees at Worldlabel.com a manufacture of blank laser and inkjet printer labels started using a colour palette to design geometric patterns.

We took these design and created a label template so folks could personalize and print. It looked great, we thought an exhibition would be a great idea, so we asked on the COLOURlovers forum if anyone would want to contribute designs for an exhibition and received several contributions. Lyell Rodieck, GreenMyEyes, submitted over 50 designs. The result of this collaborative effort is an online exhibition of CD and address label templates which can be personalized, and downloaded for free on display at WorldLabel.com.

Deciding on a favorite to download is the hardest part to getting started. Once you decide, click the template you want to download. The templates are created in Open document Format (ODF) and are easily viewed by any of these office suites: OpenOffice.org, Koffice, Staroffice IBM Lotus Symphony, or any other office suite supporting the OpenDocument format. WordPerfect Office X4 has native ODF support.

Color inspirations by way of advertisements from the 50's and 60's.

Many of these great ads were selected from an inspiring post by the design blog WellMedicated and the others from flickr. Image source links can be found by clicking on the images themselves.

Albert Henry Munsell was an American painter and teacher of art. As a painter he was noted for seascapes and portraits but he is most well known for an early attempt at creating an accurate system for numerically describing colors, now known as the Munsell Color System. His research began in 1898 with the creation of his color sphere, or tree, and came into light with the publication of A Color Notation, in 1905.

The system specifies color using three dimensions, hue (a specific color), value (lightness and darkness), and chroma (color intensity). Several earlier color order systems had placed colors into a three dimensional color solid of one form or another, but Munsell was the first to separate hue, value, and chroma into perceptually uniform and independent dimensions, and was the first to systematically illustrate the colors in three dimensional space. Munsell’s system, and particularly the later renotations, is based on rigorous measurements of human subjects’ visual responses to color, putting it on a firm experimental scientific basis. Because of this basis in human visual perception, Munsell’s system has outlasted its contemporary color models, and though it has been superseded for some uses by models such as CIELAB (L*a*b*) and CIECAM02, it is still in wide use today.

Here’s a roundup of the most colorful art, products, websites and such that I’ve come across in the last week.

Science

Men Are Red, Women Are Green, Brown Researcher Finds

sciencedaily.com

Men are red. Women are green. Michael J. Tarr, a Brown University scientist, and graduate student Adrian Nestor have discovered this color difference in an analysis of dozens of faces. They determined that men tend to have more reddish skin and greenish skin is more common for women.

The finding has important implications in cognitive science research, such as the study of face perception. But the information also has a number of potential industry or consumer applications in areas such as facial recognition technology, advertising, and studies of how and why women apply makeup...

Did you know that black is the product of all colors absorbing light? It's the color that does not reflect or give off light in any part of the visible color spectrum. I always thought that was pretty awesome. Black is a rather chic color and can be paired up against any other color and make it that much more classy. Here are a few furnishings in that slick color black.

Click on the image for the link