Blog
Articles from the ColorSift team about color, design, and more.
Designer and developer
For forty years, Kodak calibrated every color photograph against one white model. The Shirley card explains why, and why the same bias resurfaced in webcams, soap dispensers, and facial recognition.
Designer and developer
Before sponsors decided what color a race car wore, nations did. The strange, contested history of British Racing Green, Rosso Corsa, and the Silver Arrows myth that started it all.
Designer and developer
Decades of drug trials show that the color of a pill changes how sedated, alert, or reassured patients say they feel, even when the tablet inside is chemically the same. Here is what the research actually supports, and where the pharmaceutical industry took it further.
Designer and developer
How three programmers, working decades apart, solved the same color problem, and what their solutions reveal about designing syntax highlighting that works for everyone.
Designer and developer
How a nanotech coating built for satellites ended up at the center of an art world feud over whether anyone can truly own a color.
Designer and developer
Tyrian purple cost three times its weight in gold, reeked badly enough to be legal grounds for divorce, and decided who could call themselves emperor, until an 18-year-old accidentally ended the monopoly in a London lab.
Designer and developer
Cities raced to swap amber sodium streetlights for efficient white LEDs, then discovered many had picked the wrong white. Here is the color temperature fight that cost Davis, California $350,000, split doctors from lighting engineers, and quietly reshaped how towns light their streets.
Designer and developer
Screens make color by adding light and printers make it by subtracting it, and that single difference means some of your favorite colors can never leave the screen. Here is the physics behind the mismatch, and how designers plan around it.
Designer and developer
Two colors can match perfectly under one light and clash under another, and it is not a mistake. A look at metamerism, the color science glitch behind paint recalls, LED lighting problems, and why two people can see the same screen differently.
Designer and developer
A famous finding said red uniforms help Olympic athletes win. Twenty years of follow-up research found the bias was sitting in the referees, not the fighters.
Designer and developer
The Purkinje effect explains why submarines, aircraft cockpits, and night-mode apps all reach for red light after dark, and why night vision goggles and new research are rewriting that 200-year-old rule.
Designer and developer
Butterflies, peacocks, and opals make some of the most vivid color in nature without a single molecule of pigment. Here is how structural color actually works, and why designers are starting to steal the trick.