Today, more than ever, companies need to separate themselves from others that share the same crowded marketplaces, and it is being done with branding and creating a unique and easily recognizable visual identity. The visual identity of a business can be one of its most valuable intangible assets, and part of that visual identity is color.

Referring to Business Week’s ‘Best Global Brands 2007‘ (link to PDF) report, which ranks “brands which place high importance on managing the economic value of their intangible assets, and primary their brands, consistently out preform basic economic measures,” we selected what may be the most easily identifiable logos in the corporate world today, then stripped them of every line and gradient to pullout just the color palettes. See if they are just as strong without the logo itself.

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“A simple and harmonious life with nature and people.”

Shinto is considered Japans native religion. A system of simplicity and beauty, the main ideas behind Shinto are rooted not in the after-life, like many other popular belief systems, but rather in finding harmony with your current surroundings in the present. There is no strict dogma or prayer, and no hierarchy of Gods to worship. Rather, Shinto is a collection of rituals and methods to strengthen relationship of living humans and kami, also known as spirits. Some kami can be specific to local customs, others, are larger, shared natural objects such as Amaterasu, the Sun goddess, or Mount Fuji. But the general understanding is that everything contains a kami.

Four Affirmations of Shinto:

• Tradition and the family: The family is seen as the main mechanism by which traditions are preserved. Their main celebrations relate to birth and marriage.
• Love of nature: Nature is sacred; to be in contact with nature is to be close to the kami. Natural objects are worshipped as containing sacred spirits.
• Physical cleanliness: Followers of Shinto take baths, wash their hands, and rinse out their mouths often.
• “Matsuri”: Any festival dedicated to the Kami, of which there are many each year.

A common translation for Shinto is “the way of the Gods,” with many of the gods falling in line with the animistic belief system, assigning spirits and souls to animals and plants. This belief is the main source behind the Japanese cultural harmony and appreciation for nature, along with many other cultural traditions. Sumo wrestling, chopsticks, garden design, flower arranging, architecture, and removing your shoes before entering a building, are all said to stem from Shinto.

Photo from Just A Slice

Shinto and Buddhism

The system of Shinto went through some changes with the adoption of Buddhism after it’s introduction in the 6th century. It wasn’t until this time that a name was actually created in order to distinguish it from that of Buddhism. The way of life, and belief system, that was encompassed by that traditional religion, became known as Shinto. The two systems have largely, but not without the usual purification attempts by some, coexisted and combined and become seamless with Japanese culture.


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A recent touring exhibition is turning a long held common belief on its head. The common perception is that the great statues and buildings of ancient Greece and Rome were all pure unpainted stone or green tarnished bronze, but researchers have been arguing that this may not been what these classic monuments really looked like back in the era of their creation. That, in fact, these statue’s were quite alive and vibrant, full of color.

Researchers believe, particalurly Vinzenz Brinkmann who has been doing this research for the past 25 years, that artists used mineral and organic based colors and after centuries of deterioration any trace of pigment leftover when discovered, would have been taken off during any cleaning processes done before being put on display, washing the historical art clear of its true colors.

The findings of this research completley changes the commonly held modern ideas of the ancient world, and the way we view modern sculpture and art today, much of which was based on those classical Greek and Roman styles.

Photo from Stiftung Archaeologie

The exhibition, ‘Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity’ features more than 20 full-size color reconstructions of Greek and Roman works, alongside 35 original statues and reliefs. In two reviews of the exhibition, which is running at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional works at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, the authors describe the experience of first seeing something that was, for so long, thought to be a bare, lifeless statue, now come to life with color.

Photo from Stiftung Archaeologie

Walking through the galleries, I pause in front of a color reconstruction of a marble portrait of the Roman emperor Caligula, who ascended the throne in a.d. 37 at age 25, and ruled until his assassination four years later. I’m used to seeing him in “classic white”: his pupil-less eyes set against a ghostly pallor, frozen in a regal gaze. But color makes me focus on different facial features, such as the mop of thick, brown hair that frames his fleshy face, which is accented by bright hazel eyes and soft rosy lips. His cheeks are shaded in areas that bring out a plumpness, revealing his youth. I feel as if the deceased despot from my dry history books was actually once young, handsome, and alive.
- archaeology.org

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With more and more artists being commissioned to create original work for some of the largest skateboarding companies in the market, the skateboard deck is becoming a highly sought after medium by both artists and collectors. We thought we would take a look at some of the more colorful decks currently influencing both skateboards and art collectors. The images from Chocolate and Alien Workshop are accompanied by the writing of Sean Cliver as he talks about his life as a skateboard designer and his inspiration behind Disposable: A history of Skateboard Art, his current book highlighting over 1,000 skate board graphics from the last 30 years.

Alien Workshop

Disposable: A history of Skateboard Art: The Making Of

In my late teens and early twenties, my attitude was all piss and vinegar,
and the only time worth living or acknowledging was the present—
the classic attributes of any skateboarder, I guess. Then, without
even realizing it, 15 years passed and I found myself going, “Whoa,
how the hell did that happen?!” With this spatial wedge of time driven
between my insolent years of youthful abandon and present state of
being (which now includes a wife, son, and slightly more long-term perspective
on life), I fell into a pronounced period of reflection—mostly just
wondering how I made it out alive. Leafing through my catalog of memories—
an increasingly difficult thing to do living in California, where seasons
are nonexistent and the endless sunshine bleaches all recollections
to an indiscernible haze of months and years—I established the
one constant in all my prominent life experiences: skateboard graphics.

Alien Workshop

To make a long story short—at least for now, that is—I was just an
average kid from Wisconsin who first staked his claim in life on art and
then years later skateboarding. The combination of these two elements
ignited an unbelievable journey that would first and foremost involve
winning an “art contest” advertised by Powell Peralta in 1988, whereupon
I moved straight from the sticks of the Midwest to the spasmodic
heart of the skateboard industry in California. There I somehow managed
to live, thrive, and survive as an artist throughout one of the most
amazing and tumultuous eras in the history of skateboarding, when
graphics transformed into formidable marketing tools and pushed all
possible boundaries from sex, drugs, violence, race, religion, politics,
and copyright laws.

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It is pretty much expected that we will encounter toxins everyday. Whether it is plastics, cleaning products, or other synthetic materials, we are surrounded by harmful toxins. Toxins that in large enough doses could kill us, so even encountering small traces of these can probably lead to health problems, and would logically be something to avoid, if given the chance. Lucky for us our plant friends live to clean the air around us - thanks guys.

In the June issue of GOOD Magazine they put together a great info-graphic of the three most common household toxins and the plant species that research has shown to cleanse and detoxify the air of these potentially harmful toxins.

Full Size

The three most common household toxins, as broken down by the GOOD info-graphic, are:

• Trichloroethylene: Effects similar to alcohol poisoning: headache and dizzinness, with long-term damage to the liver and kidneys
• Formaldehyde: A very common indoor pollutant; can cause headaches, watery eyes, and difficulty breathing; is classified as a possible human carcinogen by the EPA
• Benzene: Can cause drowsiness, dizziness, vomiting, and unconsciousness; has a pleasant smell, which is why it used to be a common ingredient in aftershave

Toxic chemicals like formaldehyde, benzene, radon, trichloroethylene and carbon monoxide can come from a variety of seemingly innocuous household sources like cleaning materials, your furnace, and even your house itself. These chemicals can contribute to allergies, asthma and a host of other conditions including cancer.

NASA studies have shown that the presences of plants in your indoor environment can significantly reduce your exposure to these toxic airborne chemicals and greatly improve the quality of living. Since many of us spend so much time indoors at home and at work it’s very important that we bring some of the outdoors in and here are some of the best plants to do that with…
- greenupgrader.com

Golden Pathos

Photo by Plant Oasis

• Formaldehyde: Carpet

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The umbrella or parasol, brolly, gamp, parapluie and bumbershoot, as it is also known in other names, is one of man’s oldest artifacts. Its long history spans great empires and interminable distances, and has been on record since there were records for things to be on. The history dates back just far enough that there is no conclusive evidence or agreement among brolliologists, those who study umbrellas, of the its true origin. Nor is it agreed upon whether it was first used as protection from the sun or from the rain.

Below is a wonderfully interesting article about umbrellas that I found over at the Big Site of Amazing Facts, mixed in with a little color inspiration.

Photo by dearoot

The umbrella is so old that brolliologists can’t agree on its origin, or decide whether it was first used for protection from the rain or the sun. They do know that it was employed as an item of religious and ceremonial regalia from the earliest days of ancient Egypt. Egyptian mythology held that the visible sky was actually the underbelly of a god stretched from one end of the earth to the other like an immense umbrella. Hence, in contemporary art, priests and Pharoahs were often placed in the shade of an umbrella to symbolize royal and religious power.

Assyrian tablets dating from 1350 B.C. depict a king leading his retinue while servants shade the royal head with a long-handled parasol. In India, a religious group known as the Jains called their ultimate heaven of perfected souls by a name that translates as “The Slightly Tilted Umbrella.”

Photo by Elizabeth Thomsen

The early Greeks used the umbrella as a symbol of productivity and sexual aggression, usually associated with the god Bacchus, and they carried umbrellas in many of their parades and festivals. In later centuries, the Greeks put the umbrella to a more utilitarian use as a sunshade, and developed sunshade hats similar to the sombrero.

The Romans, too, used parasols against the sun. Women attending chariot races in the amphitheatre sometimes dyed their parasols to denote their favorite chariot team. If you’ve ever attended a football game in drizzly weather and have been annoyed to no end by umbrellas blocking your line of vision, you may find it comforting to know that the Romans had a similar problem at their games, with a hot dispute over parasol use finally decided by the emperor Domitian, in favor of the sunshade.

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As more people are using bicycles as their main form of transportation, especially within metropolitan areas where most people only travel a few miles everyday, sharing the roads has become more of an issue.

In an attempt to raise public awareness and start a dialog about the rights of cyclists and the problems with our current road sharing systems, people across the country, and across the world, are creating Ghost Bikes as a memorial to those who have been struck or killed while riding on the public streets.

Photo by Howard Kaplan

What Are Ghost Bikes

Ghost Bikes are bikes that have been built from scrap or donated parts that can no longer be reused. They are stripped of all unnecessary parts that could potentially be desicrated or reclaimed for scrapes, painted stark white, then fixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed.

Photo by wiki

The History of Ghost Bikes

The first ghost bike was erected in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003 by Patrick Van Der Tuin. He got the idea after witnessing a cyclist get hit by a car in the bike lane. He painted and placed a bike frame with a hand painted sign using red lettering which read: “Cyclist Struck Here.” Since then, similar projects have started across the US and other cities worldwide.


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Today we are featuring the work of Josef Albers the famous Bauhaus teacher, painter and designer. Julie Cloutier a young artist with an eye for finding color inspiration in daily life, and Mike Womack, an interactive artist who plays between the lines of sculpture and painting to crate a unique experience of color.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers was a professor at the famous Bauhaus before immigrating to the United States after the Nazi’s closure of the school in 1933.

Once arriving in the United States, Albers began teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where his students included, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson and Susan Weil.

He most famous work, and the work featured here, is from his ‘Homage to the Square’ series, which included hundreds of paintings and prints that explored the interaction of color presented simply on squares. The mediums and techniques changed slightly over the 25 year span that he devoted to the series, starting as oil paintings on Masonite panel, Albers also produced the work as lithographs, and finally, as screen-prints.

Julie Cloutier

Taking inspiration from her daily observations of living in New York City, Julie paired up photos with color swatches to create this wonderful little book.


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Imagine distinguishing a dozen primary colors, seeing ultraviolet and infrared, and perceiving six different types of polarized light.  For the giant Mantis shrimp of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world is colorful beyond human imagination.  Reuters reports a new study by Swiss and Australian marine biologists, suggesting that Mantis shrimps need to detect minute changes in color and polarization to detect nearly invisible prey in murky seawater.  They probably also use color to send sexual signals during mating.  The scientific report is available online at the Public Library of Science Journal.

Photo by CybersamX

The typical mantis shrimp has emerald green eyes and a pale green or orange body, with bright yellow outlines.

FUN FACTS:

• Mantis shrimp have the fastest kick in the animal kingdom: 75 feet per second.  They can punch a hole through aquarium glass.
• Mantis shrimp are named for their resemblance to the praying mantis insect.
• Their coloration varies to match their habitats.  The golden mantis is green when it dwells in sea grasses but tan in sandy areas.  The crevice-dwelling rock mantis varies from dark green to black.
• Mantis shrimp tend to be active hunters at night.

Photo by sandstep

Here are some color palettes inspired by the Mantis shrimps:

 


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What is color? Is it purely a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, divisible into nanometers of wavelength and lux of intensity? Or is it a vocabulary that allows us to describe the world around us? Is color art, science, or both?

Is Blue Always Blue?

In 1984, George Orwell invented ‘Newspeak,’ a language that makes alternative thinking impossible by removing the words used to describe such thought: if you have no word for ‘revolution,’ you will not start one… Newspeak was based on the idea of ‘linguistic relativism,’ the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anthropological linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Whorf, were convinced that our language constructs our reality: that we see the world through the lens of our own language and anything not encompassed by our language is – to us, at least – unthinkable. Do we live within the confines of our own linguistic reality?

Color terms have long been a favorite testing ground for proponents and opponents of linguistic relativism alike. The color vocabularies of the world’s languages are, well, colorful, and far from identical. Russian discriminates between ‘light blue’ goluboy (голубой) and ‘dark blue’ siniy (синий). Dani, an Indonesian language, has but two words for color: mili, usually associated with dark colors, and mola, usually associated with light colors (it is more complex than this, but that’s the gist). Yet despite these fun linguistic anecdotes, generally speaking, we all share the same color palette. In the late 1970s, the World Color Survey looked at 110 languages from non-industrialized countries worldwide (it is thought that color saturation in industrialized nations skews results for languages like English and French). The survey found that when all the data was plotted, six cross-linguistic peaks emerged, corresponding to English’s pink/red, brown, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Some peaks were taller than others, and some languages had color terms that did not fit into the major peaks, but the survey provided evidence that we’re all more or less looking at the same rainbow.

Photo by -sel-

Why is Blue ‘Blue?’

Human eyes have two kinds of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. Rod cells have one type of photosensitive pigment that allows us to differentiate between light and dark and helps us detect motion. Cone cells have three types of photosensitive pigments – red, green, and blue – that allow us to see in color and in detail. Together, they tell us everything they see in the visible spectrum. But biology is only half the equation. When you look at something – the sky, for instance – your rods and cones set in motion a complex psychological process that enables you to describe what you see. This is true for all stimuli, but we’ll focus on color here.

So let’s look at the sky and see what happens. Step one is perception: your rods and cones take in the color. They tell your brain that they have perceived reflected light with a wavelength of, say, 465 nanometers. Step two is categorization: you must place what you see along the visible spectrum. Your brain says this is BLUE (all caps means it is a color category, not a color itself). Step three is lexicalization: you put that category into words: “The sky is so blue today!” The lexicalization process allows for both synonymy (RED includes both crimson and carmine) and polysemy (teal falls under both the BLUE and the GREEN categories).
But what about the Russians? Or the Dani in Indonesia? We know that neither has a word for the BLUE category, but do they still have the category?

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