Blog
Articles from the ColorSift team about color, design, and more.
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.
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.