Dear Color Lovers,
Just a reminder that when viewing colors online the computer monitor colors may vary. Thank hue for your understanding. Enjoy.
December 31, 2008
By Leatrice Eiseman for Kate's Paperie in Manhattan, NY
GIFTS IN COLOR
We look to Mother Nature as she truly is the best color instructor.
Giving a gift is an act of kindness—one that should be enjoyed by both recipient and the giver. We have all had the experience of opening a gift and feeling that rush of pleasure especially if that gift is in a favorite color. But how do we know what colors will evoke an emotional connection? The answer is that we look to Mother Nature as she truly is the best color instructor.
Nature’s colors do appear to vary during the course of a day, because of changing light in the atmosphere, forming various ‘palettes.’ In the earliest hours, a dewy ‘wetness’ permeates the atmosphere. The natural elements of water and air are a strong influence on the predominantly cool blue undertones of what is called the ‘Sunrise’ Colortime™ palette. This palette literally sparkles with jewel tones such as amethyst, emerald, royal blue and turquoise. There are some warm colors included, but they are pure and cooled down, like sparkling Chardonnay or luscious berries.
At the opposite extreme, is the Sunset Colortime palette. This is the time of day when colors take on a golden, mellow, ‘drier’ quality, eventually exploding into the fiery colors of Sunset. The natural elements of fire and earth light up this palette with festive reds, glowing ambers, hazy magentas and vibrant corals. Zesty pesto greens and periwinkle blues add a tasteful touch.
Nestled between Sunrise and Sunset is the Sunlight Colortime palette. These are the hours that the sun shines at its brightest, rendering the colors it lights on a bit more muted and sun drenched. All of the natural elements are represented here, with ‘natural’ a key word as all shadings are subtle. Think delicious shades of grape, peach, strawberry and bisque, balanced by placid blues and willow greens.
Mother Nature also provides a group of colors that are found frequently in nature, so that our eyes are accustomed to seeing them in combination with many other colors. There are 18 of these Crossover Colors™ , as they are called, among them, the black of night, sandy beach beige, stone gray and the ubiquitous signal color, true red. Within this palette are also the colors that have grown to symbolize the concept of “sustainability’. This eco-awareness theme rings true for so many people today as it speaks to the preservation of earth reflected symbolically in the rich browns, tans and taupes. The purity of water is expressed both in the sky and ocean depth blues, while the need for solar energy is represented by sunny yellow. And most importantly is pineneedle green, the color most connected to the preservation of nature.
Taking a bit of extra time and thinking about the personal coloring of the gift recipient can be a vital clue to your success in gift selection as most people tend to prefer colors that blend with their natural coloring. For example, have you noticed that redheads, people with golden blonde or brown hair with amber brown eyes invariably gravitate to earthtones? They are the golden Sunsets. People with really dark, silver or silvery blonde hair with really dark eyes or cool blue eyes prefer cooler shades. They are the sparkling Sunrises. Then there are those ‘in between’, often with a variety of different shades in their hair or and changeable eye colors that seem to be like chameleons changing with every color they wear. They are the subtle Sunlights.
Try to use these colorful guidelines the next time you purchase a gift and watch the “giftee’s” eyes really light up!
Visit Lee's others websites at, www.colorexpert.com and www.morealivewithcolor.com
December 29, 2008
Excerpt from
What Your iPod Says About You
Forbes.com
Elizabeth Woyke and Brian Caulfield
Apple's iPod sports many personalities. Who do you want to be today?
Apple recently rolled out brightly hued versions of the nano handsets, including a red iPod nano and iPod shuffle. Apple's ads push the colorful little music players with the simple tag line "nano-chromatic."
Apple was the first company to realize that gizmo players are as much about personal expression as they are about function. More recently, companies cranking out mobile phones have caught on, too. "Phones are becoming reflections of us as individuals and an important way to express our personalities," says Ehtisham Rabbani, vice president of product strategy and marketing for LG.
It's a sharp contrast to the drab shades most consumer electronics sported just a few years ago. Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, says tech companies, with the exception of forward-thinking Apple, largely ignored her color recommendations up through the '90s. "They didn't understand the impact of color--they felt it had nothing to do with their devices," she recalls.
That's changing. The color trend in cellphones ramped up in mid-2007. Consider the Samsung Juke, which Verizon released in October 2007 in red, aqua and royal blue. Phones like the sporty Juke, which appeal to younger consumers, are often first to get the color treatment. Nokia just announced two new colors--passionate purple and graphite--for its fashion-conscious Supernova line of phones in Europe.
Handsets that target older customers, such as pricey smart phones, are more likely to be offered in more conservative colors, says Sapna Tahliani, a device marketing manager for Verizon Wireless. That's starting to change, though. Research In Motion's BlackBerry, long considered the workhorse of smart phones, now comes in pink, red, amethyst, gold and--in the U.K.--a reddish orange shade called "sunset."
That's because our emotional reactions to color guide our shopping decisions, says Eiseman. That has handset manufacturers studying color psychology, investing in materials research and consulting color forecasts.
Of course, no one knows that better than Apple. It's iPod nano now comes in nine colors. However, when it comes to adding color to mobile phones, Apple lags behind. While a myriad of colorful third party cases and covers are available, Apple's phones still come with just a basic black, or white, back.
Apple isn't the only phone maker going for a basic look. In a sign that neutrals aren't totally passé, Rabbani says black is LG's most "stable" color across all demographics. Among younger consumers, light blue is increasingly hot. "Blue is a safe color with appeal across gender and age groups," he notes. "Light blue stands out; it's the new pink." LG relaunched the Chocolate, a sleek music player/phone, earlier this year in a pale blue.
Fittingly, blue is America's favorite color, says Eiseman. "Consumer products often include blue in some form because a certain percentage of the population will always respond to it," she adds.
Says Eiseman, "Today, if you don't do something that involves color, you're seen as very backward or very boring." Clearly, that's a message few people want to send about themselves.
December 21, 2008
A recent blog post to Pantone's colour of the year choice for 2009
From tenacityworks.com
Blog entry: COLOUR OF NOW
So Pantone just chose their colour of the year for 2009. Interesting choice… “14-0848 Mimosa, a warm, engaging yellow, is the color of the year for 2009. In a time of economic uncertainty and political change, optimism is paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow.”
Read up a bit about the psychology of colour and apparently yellow is “considered an optimistic color, people lose their tempers more often in yellow rooms, and babies will cry more. It is the most difficult color for the eye to take in, so it can be overpowering if overused. Yellow enhances concentration, hence its use for legal pads. It also speeds metabolism.”
Maybe blue would have been a better choice for our times as apparently people are more productive in blue rooms. Studies also show weightlifters are able to handle heavier weights in blue gyms.
I suppose it would have been a bit of a downer if they chose Cool Gray 10C.
Lee's comment to the post
As the director of the Pantone Color Institute and the person involved in choosing Mimosa, I can tell you the choices are thoughtful and meaningful– not just an arbitrary choice. At this point in time people need reasons to try to be optimistic and yellow is invariably the color that people (in our studies) think of as representing hope and good cheer. They do not lose their tempers more in yellow rooms– that is erroneous information, there are no studies to back it up– it has become an urban legend that is false. Leatrice Eiseman
December 18, 2008
NPR - New York
National Public Radio's New York affiliate.
Interviewed by Brian Lehrer.
Brian: What have you seen happening in the last year due to economy?
Lee: More neutral colors are being used, but what we’re finding now is that
this may be true only of high-ticket items. Also, what we’re seeing is that
people are using more color as accent.
Brian: How do you know that trend towards neutral palette is due to housing
bust?
Lee: Conventional wisdom has always said to use neutral colors, but we have
seen a change. With all informational shows out there, people are learning how
to use color. More color is actually being used now that makes your home more
memorable, so you should do something memorable with color in your house.
Brian: What’s the hot color for next year?
Lee: Pantone has named Mimosa Yellow as the Color of the Year and there’s a
very good reason for that. Every color has an emotional attachment and with
yellow we have optimism, sunshine. It’s very cheerful but not overwhelming.
It’s a beautiful, mellow yellow.
December 15, 2008
Setting A New Tone
By Donna Sapolin
FLYP MEDIA
Visit www.flypmedia.com/issues/19/#5/1
to hear Lee describe color forecasting, taste and psychology.
FLYP (www.flypmedia.com) is an online
magazine that offers a window on the issues
shaping America and, by extension, the
world. FLYP aims to exploit the full palette
of available web tools to provide users with
an engaging, easy-to-navigate and enriching
multimedia experience.
December 11, 2008
Mental Floss Magazine
A portion from
How Cereal Transformed American Culture
by Ian Lender
Making Red Blood Redder
In many ways, the cereal flake is the perfect consumer product. It’s easy to produce, easy to sell, and surprisingly lucrative. To this day, cereal comes with an eye-popping profit margin of 50 percent. These merits became clear to Charles Post, a failed suspender salesman who moved to Battle Creek in 1895. Post began selling knock-off versions of Kellogg’s products with a twist of his own—advertising. At the time, advertising was associated with snake-oil salesmen and con artists. But Post, who had a background in sales, didn’t mind drizzling a little snake oil on his product. He published pamphlets with titles such as “The Road To Wellville” and claimed his cereal, Grape-Nuts, could cure appendicitis, improve one’s IQ, and even “make red blood redder.” By 1903, he was clearing $1 million a year.
Across town, Dr. Kellogg refused to sully The San’s reputation with heathen advertising, and his profits suffered as a result. W.K., however, had no such qualms and set out to emulate Post. In his first national campaign, he told women to “Wink at your grocer, and see what you get.” (Answer: a free box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.) Within a year, he’d sold 1 million cases of cereal. With the leading cereal makers embracing such unabashed hucksterism, it was clear that cereal’s connection to its fundamentalist roots had come to an end.
Thinking Outside the Box
All across America, the eyes of investors lit up with dollar signs, and would-be cereal barons descended on Battle Creek like locusts. By 1911, 107 brands of corn flakes were being made in Battle Creek alone.
But the cereal business had one major drawback—there was little substantive difference between brands. To stand out from the crowd, manufacturers realized that they had to focus more on the outside of the box than on what was inside. Some tried decorating their products with adjectives, creating names like University Brand Daintily Crisped Flaked Corn. Others competed to appear the healthiest. Tryabita, for example, was infused with celery flavor because, well, it sounded healthy.
But the real winner was a cereal called Force. Its mascot, Sunny Jim, was a strutting, top-hatted gentleman who became so popular in newspapers and magazines that other cereal makers rushed to create their own mascots. For a cereal called Elijah’s Manna, Charles Post even tried putting a picture of the prophet on the label. Although the product was eventually pulled, one industry ground rule had been established: Every box needs a character.
Before long, cereal makers had an insatiable appetite for finding the right mascot, regardless of the cost. During the Depression, Post Toasties decided to use cartoon animals on its boxes and paid its cartoonist $1.5 million in the first year. That artist was Walt Disney, and he used the earnings to build the Disney empire.
The Children Are the Future
Cereal’s total reliance on advertising meant that it was essential for companies to keep up with new forms of media. Quaker Oats, for example, hitched its sales to the rise of radio in the 1920s by giving away more than 1 million radios as part of a promotion. Cereal companies were also quick to buy up radio stations and produce radio shows. For the most part, they churned out dramas and gossip shows aimed at housewives. But a radical shift in demographics came in 1936, thanks to a boy named Skippy.
A Dennis the Menace type who frequently interrupted his adventures to extol the virtues of Wheaties, Skippy was the first cereal character directly marketed to children. As it turned out, kids ate him up, and cereal producers learned an important lesson: Children are suckers. The flood of kid-friendly, cereal-shilling characters that followed reads like a Who’s Who of American iconography, including the Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, and Buck Rogers. By the 1960s, cereal advertisers were devoting 90 percent of their budgets to reaching children.
In the process of targeting the young, cereal companies also realized that kids don’t care about their colons. They want sugar. Lots of sugar. In 1939, a Philadelphia heater salesman named Jim Rex created the first sugared cereal, called Ranger Joe Popped Wheat Honnies. Ironically, he designed the cereal to minimize the amount of sugar children consumed. He reasoned that if he lightly presweetened his product, kids wouldn’t add more sugar on top. He was wrong, and his good intentions were lost on bigger companies. After Ranger Joe sales skyrocketed, manufacturers started producing cereals such as Sugar Smacks, which contained a shocking 56 percent sugar.
How did cereal companies reconcile this with their original commitment to the health movement? Taking a page out of Post’s playbook, they declared that sugar wasn’t bad for you because it gave you the fuel you needed to start your day. With trusted radio personalities extolling the “energy-giving” virtues of cereal, impressionable kids and their frazzled parents rushed to stores.
TV Nation
Television took advertising for sugar cereals to a new level, and the master of the new medium was an ad man named Leo Burnett. He invented TV programs specifically designed to entertain children and sell Kellogg’s products. Much like Skippy a decade before, Burnett’s characters would turn to the screen in the middle of a show and pitch the merits of a particular brand. There was nothing subtle about it. Howdy Doody, Roy Rogers, Andy Griffith, Rin Tin Tin, the Beverly Hillbillies, Yogi Bear, and Fred Flintstone all became television icons because they were good at selling cereal.
Also at Burnett’s urging, cereal companies invested heavily in early television technology. (They still do; cereal is the second-largest advertiser on television today, behind automobiles.) The financial backing let them shape the medium to suit their needs—namely, adding color. Burnett was one of the earliest believers in motivational psychology and understood that colors appealed to kids and moms subliminally. When color TV became a reality, he persuaded Kellogg to use anthropomorphized cartoon animals as mascots. He thought animation would make for better, more colorful commercials. The first mascot they produced was Tony the Tiger, whose meteoric success was followed by hundreds of other cartoon icons.
Burnett’s advertising style was so effective that cereal sales continued to rise every year, unlike most products at the grocery store. After a while, parents and child psychologists became concerned that the ads were a little too effective. In the late 1960s, consumer advocates claimed that using cartoon characters to target children was overly manipulative, if not unethical. Eventually, in 1990, they forced Congress to pass a law banning TV characters from pitching directly to children in the middle of a show. Protective measures aside, cereal had strayed far from its wholesome origins. While Dr. Jackson’s dream of displacing pork chops from the breakfast table had become a reality, his cereal wasn’t what it used to be.
Bitten by the fangs of consumerism, Granula had transformed into Count Chocula in the course of a century.
December 9, 2008
Paint the town red
(without blowing your green)
Chicago Tribune
By Wendy Donahue
Tribune Reporter
The holiday party circuit looks subdued this year, but that doesn't mean you should.
More than ever, your fellow recessionistas need you to help make spirits bright. That means adding pops of color to the standard-issue black palette - while retaining some fiscal sobriety.
"The psychological boost is a good idea," said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute and author of "More Alive With Color" Even if you are going to go for the black dress because it's practical and something you already have in your closet, you should look to accessorize it - whether with a necklace or belt or even shoes in a color - with something that's going to lift you. And what better time to do it than during holidays when you can wear brighter colors and it can look beautiful?
December 4, 2008
Yellow expected as a bright spot for 2009
By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL
AP Fashion Writer
This undated photo provided
by Pfaltzgraff Everyday shows
a dinnerware pattern called
'Palermo' from the 'Pfaltzgraff
Everyday' collection. Pantone,
which provides color standards
to design industries, specifically
cites mimosa, a vibrant shade
illustrated by the flowers of the
mimosa tree as well as the
brunch-favorite cocktail, as its
top shade of the new year, but
the company, in general, believes
the public will embrace many
tones of optimistic yellow.
(AP Photo/Pfaltzgraff Everyday)
NEW YORK - Enough gloom and doom: There's a prediction from a leading color source that cheerful and sunny yellow will be the influential color of 2009.
Pantone, which provides color standards to design industries, specifically cites "mimosa," a vibrant shade of yellow illustrated by the flowers of some mimosa trees as well as the brunch-favorite cocktail, as its top shade of the new year. In general, Pantone expects the public to embrace many tones of optimistic yellow.
"I think it's just the most wonderful symbolic color of the future," says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. "It's invariably connected to warmth, sunshine and cheer - all the good things we're in dire need of right now."
In the spring fashion collections previewed earlier in the fall for retailers and editors, pops of yellow brightened the runways of Carolina Herrera - who called her favorite shade marigold - Badgley Mischka, Zac Posen and Michael Kors, among others. Kors even included a retro yellow polka-dot bikini that clearly harkened back to a more upbeat time.
The fashion world first embraced orange a few years ago and that has evolved into yellow, which had already been gaining popularity in the home market, too.
"People know yellow lightens up the atmosphere," Eiseman says.
Home-goods companies based in Paris and Milan, Italy, have already been heavily influenced by yellow, says Tom Mirabile, vice president of global trends and design at Lifetime Brands, Inc., whose portfolio includes Cuisinart, Farberware and Pfaltzgraff.
It helps that it looks good in florals and has a close association with nature, a driving force in the marketplace right now, and it complements current favorites green and purple. (In 2008, "blue iris," a purple-tinged blue, was color of the year.)
"I'd say you should get used to seeing yellow in places you're not used to seeing it," Eiseman says.
December 3, 2008
As Seen in MacLife magazine
by Michelle Delio
How Pantone's Color Expert Colors Your World
Eiseman formulates her color predictions
through research and staying on top of
societal and cultural shifts.
Don’t tell Leatrice Eiseman that yellow agitates adults and makes babies cry.
“After hearing that story once too often, I tracked its source and discovered it was based on false research,” she says. “Yellow evokes sunshine, warmth, and happiness—not arguments or crying.”
What people really think about color is important to Eiseman—please call her “Lee”—head of the Eiseman Center for Color Information and Training and executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. Her job is to choose the hues that will be wildly fashionable next season or next year, as well as the colors that will compel consumers to buy her clients’ products.
Eiseman doesn’t spend her working days locked up in a room crunching data or aiming darts at a brilliantly hued board to see where they land. Rather, she identifies color trends by synthesizing history, current events, psychology, marketing principles, fine art, pop art, and street fashion, along with all the information culled from her own color surveys.
“Right now, I’m researching the color preferences prevalent during previous recessions,” Eiseman says. “What I’m finding is that neutrals are preferred during economic downturns, especially for big-ticket items. People don’t want to invest in trendy-colored items when times are tough. They’re looking for stability and longevity.”
Nevertheless, Eiseman says that flooding the market with beige items isn’t necessarily the right approach right now. Instead, manufacturers should focus on coming up with new ways of combining neutrals with livelier colors to “tweak the consumer’s eye and spark interest.
How to Avoid a Marketing Blood Bath.
In the never-ending search for the new and exciting, it’s important for companies to understand how their target audiences tend to respond to specific colors. Some years ago, Shiseido hired Eiseman to consult on colors planned for use in the Japanese company’s American line of bath and beauty products. The first thing that caught Eiseman’s attention was the rejuvenating bath salts tinted bright scarlet. In the States, red-tinted water in the tub would likely conjure up visions of a blood bath, likely to appeal only to gloomy goths. Apparently the Japanese aren’t in the habit of offing themselves in the bath, but Eiseman says it wasn’t easy to convince Shiseido to go with a soft orange (though the peach-colored bath salts ultimately became a best-seller).
Eiseman suggests “pungent colors” in this spread from Color: Messages & Meanings, a Pantone Color resource guide that she wrote.
Cultural issues are easier to deal with than having a color scheme rejected because the CEO (or his spouse) hates a particular color.
“It’s not about what you or I happen to like,” says Lee. “You may despise green, but that’s not a valid reason to banish its use from the product packaging, unless you are also the target audience. And even then, you can’t just pick whatever hues appeal to you with no consideration of what those colors are communicating.”
Apple's Color Code.
Eiseman says Apple is a company that really knows how to use color effectively.
“Apple has revolutionized industrial design and made powerful technology personal through the use of color,” says Eiseman, who took a consulting gig with a major PC company some months before Apple released the first Bondi Blue iMac. She suggested that they release computers with colorful cases, but the company felt that no one would be interested.
For her part, Eiseman is a devoted Apple-tech enthusiast. She has two iMacs and a number of Apple laptops in her collection of home and office computers. She uses Keynote for all of her presentations, and her assistant, Bobbi, uses Leopard’s Spaces feature as well as CoverFlow to create online training materials. Eiseman also uses iPhoto to organize the image collections she relies on for inspiration and uses her iPhone to syndicate blog updates from anywhere in the world. She says she loves iTunes because “sometimes, mindless entertainment is the most essential application of all.”
The "Starbucks Phenomenon."
Eiseman stresses that color associations aren’t set in stone. For example, not too long ago brown was a low-rent color associated with dirt and introverted people. Then, in what Lee calls the “Starbucks phenomenon,” café culture became popular in the United States and we developed a whole new language and set of associations for brown, which is now affiliated with words like “rich,” “soothing,” “robust,” and “earthy,” as well as environmental awareness, comfort, and luxury.
“It’s a whole new world for brown now,” Eiseman says, adding that the other colors to watch in 2009 include fuchsia and other rosy hues, purple as a power color for men, and the clear, clean colors used in Japanese animation (Eiseman just designed an anime color palette for Pantone).
With all the colors that are available to us, Eiseman says she’s puzzled by the proclivity that some artsy types have for dressing head-to-toe in black.
“Granted, black is an empowering color,” she says “And it’s an easy color; there’s no need to put a look together. But I feel that creative people who dress all in black all the time are missing the opportunity to hone their skills by working with color on a personal level. Try pushing the black to the back of the closet for awhile, break out some color, and see what happens.”
For info on Eiseman, check out colorexpert.com.
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