Useful deskstop wallpapers

Great little compilation of desktop wallpapers to help you with your work whether you are a type geek or a css wizard. Here are some of our favorites:

A Short History of Prussian Blue

Fast Company published an article about Joshua Cohen's Triple Canopy article "The 36 Shades of Prussian Blue." Prussian Blue is considered to be the first synthetic color, created in 1704, it was a huge hit with artists as previous blues were often more expensive to obtain than gold.

[Photo features four iterations of the Crayola logo and the crayon formerly know as Prussian Blue. In 1958, the Prussian Blue crayon was renamed Midnight Blue because no one knew what or where Prussia was.]

Eye Candy: Creative Holly Color

Creative Holly Color is a collection of color palettes created by artists and designers and hosted in one convenient location for inspiration.



[Link thanks to Erin Mills via the work email tree]

Ars Technica calls BS on "There ain't no Magenta"

Ars Technica published an article today debunking the claims that magenta isn't a color. The rationale is that if we see it and our brains recognize as a distinctly unique color, then it exists. If you want a more scientific interpretation, feel free to read the full text and read the referring articles. See magenta, we do love you!

First Pluto, Now Magenta!

It seems that all this time, I thought magenta was a color in the spectrum. Turns out, I'm wrong.

[Thanks to BoingBoing for demoting M. C, Y and K will miss her.]

Fun Flickr Colors

Ideé Labs created a fun little Flickr application that searches through over 10 million Creative Commons images and spits back only the images containing the colors you want. Pretty impressive and fun.

Logos and the Impact of Color

Usability Post has provided a quick visual reference to logos and the impact and emotional associations with each color. Its debatable whether people really associate the emotional tags listed with each brand though.

I think UPS chose brown to get people to associate their brand with cardboard boxes, which is what they ship. I don't think of them as colonial or earthy.

Opinions?

[Link via Swiss Miss]

Color Stripes Reposes in Watercolor

Awhile ago we mentioned Kris's Color Stripes, a site devoted to pulling color palettes out of photography. While on holiday this summer, she used her travels to paint in her sketchbook and collect her colors on paper rathe than digitally. Thankfully, she has saved them online for all to enjoy.

Miyazaki Color Palettes on Colour Lovers

Colour Lovers has a nice article about the color palettes used by the Miyazaki films to create the lush dreamworlds of his films. But really, I mention it so that I have an excuse to post a picture from one of my all-time favorite films, My Neighbor Totoro.

Pantone Color Trends

Pantone announced its color trends for both Spring and Autumn 2008 at Fashion Week last week. Here's the lowdown:

Pantone is predicting bright colors for Spring 2008:

“The spring ‘08 color palette perfectly reflects the cheerfulness of the season,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Stabilizing neutrals combined with pops of brighter colors to create unique, distinctive looks are the basis for a great spring and summer wardrobe.”

And for Autumn:

"Fall is traditionally a time for subdued, quiet colors, but this season we are seeing a shift toward cool hues with bright, exciting undertones," said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. "Conventional tones such as warm autumn hues, chocolate browns and steel grays are also among the fall color choices. Blue and purple tones have become staples, as illustrated by Blue Iris, one of the top 10 colors chosen by designers this season, and Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2008."

Though these are fashion predictions, its just as likely that these colors will influence home decor and design in general. Just thought we should all be informed.

[Tips and images thanks to Decor 8]

Video: Pantone Color Kill

Pantone color book mutilation and scooters... what's not to love.

Color research: Colourlovers and more

We posted about several color reference tools but have been negligent in mentioning either ColorLovers or Kuler -- partly because we assumed our esteemed readers would already be familiar with these tools. I've been harboring the link for both thinking I'd do a big comparison and detailed review but -- phooey! -- they are two different beasts and if there were to be a mano a mano fight to death, Adobe's Kuler would win because its clear that one day it will be built-in to the Adobe CS suite. We can already build color sets and save them out, its only a matter of time before there is an "upload to Kuler" or "download from Kuler" option.



So, I post this just in case you haven't taken the time to check out these tools. They may prove useful or just merely entertaining.

Color Studies from Color Stripes

Kris of Color Stripes uses her blog to collect color studies from photo inspiration and the world around her. Its a lovely experiment and very inspirational.

[Thanks for the tip, Christina!]

More Color Play

Color must be in the air this week. This morning, someone mentioned the Color Blender tool. Its a very stripped-down version of Kuler and ColourLovers but a free color tool is a free color tool. It provides hex and RGB numbers and lets you download the palette to Photoshop or Illustrator.


[Sample screen from ColorBlender]

I find it curious that color and color palette tools keep popping up. If you have any recommendations for other color tools, send them along to us here at Pica+Pixel – our email address is in the sidebar. Thanks!

Color Palette Generator

Big Huge Labs is now offering a color palette generator tool. You can either upload a photo or link to a photo on your flickr page in order to generate a palette.

Here's our example image:



And the resulting palette:


The results are quick and may be a quick solution to picking colors for your next project.

What a Bunch of Characters!

{Ok, even I'll admit that the title of this post is an awful pun}



{a grid of cool characters from Mojizu)

{Mr Sam Easter, toothbrush salesman}

Thanks to a link on ColourLovers blog, I found my way to Mojizu, a user-submitted collection of illustrated characters. Vote and adopt your favorites and submit your own creations!



{Chewbacca}