Blog
Articles from the ColorSift team about color, design, and more.
Designer and developer
Milk has no orange pigment, yet cheddar comes out orange. The reason is a centuries-old cover-up involving skimmed cream, grass, and a seed from South America.
Designer and developer
Red and green LEDs came first. Blue took until 1993, won a Nobel Prize, and is the reason your screen and your ceiling light can make white at all. Here is the 20-year fight over one crystal.
Designer and developer
Wall maps colour elevation green, yellow, brown and white. The scheme was fought over for a century, and it still makes deserts look like forests. Here is how it works and what it teaches about colour scales.
Designer and developer
A cheap, fade-proof green covered Victorian walls and contained arsenic. William Morris printed it, and his family money came from the mine that supplied it.
Designer and developer
In 1917 the Royal Navy stopped trying to hide its ships and covered them in black, white and blue zigzags instead. Here is what the colours were meant to do, and whether they worked.
Designer and developer
The Rietveld Schröder House is the world's best-known image of primary color. Its restorers say the walls are five greys, and the greys were the hard part.
Designer and developer
In 1876 a Swedish physiologist staged a demonstration for railway bosses with two color-blind conductors and a set of doctored lanterns. It worked. What the Lagerlunda crash really proves about signal color and luminance.
Designer and developer
Pink was once a boys' color, or so the story goes. The record is messier: a century of mixed signals, a retail chart, and a color rule that is mostly learned.
Designer and developer
Goethe held a prism up to a white wall, saw no rainbow, and decided Newton was wrong. He was wrong about physics, but his notes on shadows, haze and warm and cool colour still shape how designers work.
Designer and developer
Obangsaek is the traditional Korean palette of blue, red, yellow, white and black. Each color carries a direction, an element and a season. Here is how the system works and where you can still see it.
Designer and developer
Homer used black 170 times and blue never. A look at what that count, Russian speakers, the Himba and Japanese traffic lights say about how words shape the way you sort color.
Designer and developer
Egyptian blue was the first synthetic pigment, lost for centuries, and it still shines in infrared. Here is how it was made, why it vanished, and how scientists now use its glow to find paint nobody can see.