Blog
Articles from the ColorSift team about color, design, and more.
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.
Designer and developer
Indigo is the one dye that refuses to go all the way in. That quirk explains why jeans fade, why Bengal rose up in 1859, and why a German chemical plant ended a plant-based empire.
Designer and developer
Blue links trace back to one line in the 1993 Mosaic changelog. Here is what we know about why, what the purple twin does, and what Google's 41 blues really prove.
Designer and developer
Cochineal is a red dye made from a cactus-eating insect. It was worth more than its weight in silver, dressed British soldiers, and got a Frappuccino recipe changed in 2012. Here is the story of one very stubborn red.
Designer and developer
Millions of women may carry a genetic fourth color receptor, but a functional extra channel is vanishingly rare. What tetrachromacy research reveals about the gap between having the hardware and actually seeing more color.
Designer and developer
Around 1706, a ruined batch of red dye is said to have produced Prussian blue. Three centuries later, the same pigment shows up in Hokusai's Great Wave, the invention of the blueprint, and a modern antidote for radiation poisoning.
Designer and developer
How Ralph Eggleston brought a pastel-on-black-paper technique from FernGully to Toy Story, and turned it into the tool that plans every Pixar film's emotional arc in color before animation starts.
Designer and developer
A 1857 chromium patent, a Civil War shortcut, and an accessibility lawsuit explain why the dollar never got the redesign the rest of the world already had.
Designer and developer
How a color invented in a home darkroom after a head injury became the exact shade OSHA legally requires you to wear, tested against fog, deer eyesight, and the open ocean along the way.
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.