BY GADI AMIT
Ever wondered why the only colors many industries now offer you are black, white, silver, or gray? I love colors and it strikes me as odd how colors have been tuned out of so many products.
While some colors are seasonal and faddish, others are perennials; a good color may last centuries, even if its use is up some decades, and down others. Colors capture our cultural subconscious and stay there for a long time. But somehow we’re now in a boring, monochromatic world.
To industry, colors are a headache. They are tough to manufacture with consistency, hard to predict based on issues of taste, and always leave someone unsatisfied or worse, blogging furiously about “that hideous color.”
The ’90s were more colorful age, while the ’00s somehow dwindled into a colorless abyss. I remember attending a focus group for Acer in 1996. frogdesign helped Acer introduce the Aspire, then a blockbuster PC that came in color… the first colorful PC.
The focus group was an educational experience like no other. Thirty or forty adults from the Bay area were asked about colors and reacted freely. When they were asked in private about their color preferences for the new product line, they made clear and often bold decisions. However, when asked as a group to pick their favorite color of the current year’s PC, they unanimously picked slate–the designers’ euphemism for dark gray.
VIA: fastcompany.com