These are personal, not trending.

1. Orange

Orange is unequivocally the best color. By degree, red and yellow are both colors associated with danger and alarm. Not so with orange. Instead, orange is that whistful twang you feel during autumn. It is unique in being both warm and inviting. Orange is to red what your chill uncle is to your opressive parents.

2. Green

Green has a very wide range of big moods. It's ties to natural splendor alone make it a color of rejuvination, the untamed, health, liberation, authenticity and groundedness. It is also the color of envy, simulation, sickness, inexperience, mold, decay, money and greed. For these reasons I consider green to be the color of psychological complexity and ambiguousness. It tells the story of humanity in its confrontations with death and natural order on the one hand, and the virtual world of currency, status and expertise on the other. Nietzsche liked the color green.

3. Purple

Purple dye was once a very rare commodity because of how difficult and time intensive it was to milk the predatory snails that secreted it. In addition, the "mauve" zone in Twin Peaks was so beautiful I cried. Honestly, purple should probably be higher on the list. Purple contains multitudes...but also contradictions. It is, on the one hand, a color of mystery and magic, the color of that which lies outside the techno-scientific biopower apparatus that glues us all in place. At the same time, it is the color of royalty and the upper crust, the color of supremacy and the reigning order. How do we synthesize these contradictions? Do guillotines come in purple?

4. Blue

In both the US and in Europe, blue is the most beloved overall color amongst both men and women. The color blue is invited to every party and is, ironically, never thirsty (because it's the color of water, see?). Blue is percieved as (but may not actually be) the color of professionalism, harmony, confidence, the infinite and the imagination. The future is so bright for blue that it's quickly becoming turquoise. But there's a light tickle at the back of Blue's throat that he just can't ignore. No matter how popular and well connected blue is, there is always that tinge of sadness, that tinge of isolation, that no social validation will ever cure.

Published by Alex in Color Theory, Design, Design Concepts
Tags: Color