#design isnt my passion its my white whale

[alinktoana]

when i tell youve ive had emotional breakdowns bc of color... the company i work for is usually really ok about having fun colors and design, but some of our clients *love* to say they go for a more sober/elegant aesthetic, while having a _grey + yellow combo_ as their main colors. sometimes i give up and desaturate everything so it looks like mud, and they love it. sometimes ill wage war email wars over our right _as humans_ to have fun with color. sometimes i win, sometimes i lose. i looooove (/s) companies that say they have a clean, sophisticated and subtle aesthetic while having the most boring ass branding. it doesnt mean good taste, it means anxiety. theyre afraid of competition, they wanna blend in and say theyre oh so serious and competent. there *are* stablished companies that are bold, damn, even government branding can be fun, and burocracy is their middle name lol. and i know weve been through the great flattening, corporate memphis. ive beneffited from that and still do. but we gotta move on, for our own emotional health lol

she's beauty, she's grace, she's the queen of 50 greys.

yes that is the color palette of the latest client ive been *dealing* with. fun fact, that last grey's hex code is #aaaaaa. it's like poetry.

story time! a couple weeks ago i was kinda tired and almost burning out, and then my bf showed me the nintendo alarmo announcement. i was so upset, so enraged, so sad, my whole day was ruined lol why? bc _the switch has no personality_. disclaimer that i dont own a switch, but i was messing witha friend's switch a couple months ago. and it *baffled me* how the only themes were black and white, the mii feature was basically hidden, it had basically no sound, and the main ui basically looks like netflix.

i didnt grow up with consoles, i mostly played on pcs. and i got my first console ever, a ps3, on 2012, and then i bought a 3ds on 2015. maybe it's the fruitiger aero of the time, i dont know, but they had a soul, you know. i was taken aback by how neutral the ps4 was but, granted, i didnt play on it much. but nintendo. nintendo, who had a decade of design soul and passion from the wii to the wiiu, releasing the switch with the barest bones ever, and then asking people a crazy amount of money for _a clock, with themes, that couldve been on the switch_? i never had a nDS, and i did some finaggling with my 3ds so now i can download dsi apps. i get that the ds and the 3ds were a lot of people's first smart devices and they dont need those anymore, but seeing the animal crossing clock for the dsi, as cute as it could be, *for free*, and the alarmo basically on the same week made my head in. why didnt they add the alarmo to the switch then???????????? i understand that most people wont have it on their bedrooms like they would have the DSs. but. this is beyond the alarmo, it's beyond the switch, it's color and life. i spent years feeling butthurt i didnt have a switch, and coming to learn that it doesnt have nearly as much heart as the previous decade, ive finally taken the copium that im ok without it lol even the most basic OSs like microsoft, linux, browsers, even the most simple apps will allow you to change the background. the switch doesnt even allow you that. and then nintendo shows up with a clock with themes??????? i *hope* that that means the wii u trauma is over, and that the switch 2 is gonna come back from the aesthetic comma...

"are you not entertained?" side note: my parents moved to a new apartment in 2018, and made loads of renovations. a friend of mine met me there once and said that our living room looked like a hospital waiting room. *and it does*. a friend of my mom's, an architect, designed that. my civil engineering mother approved that. a lot of people say _oh but we're bombarded by color all the time, so much advertising, everybody wants to sell me everything_, and yet the kardashian clan made a whole empire of greige. and people ate that up. minimalism doesnt need to mean the end of color, the end of fun, it can be about harmony. as we're reaching the mid2020s, i really, really hope that companies stop being so afraid of color, of boldness, of life. i hope that we as *people* stop being afraid of color. we all know the political/economic climate is difficult, but when has it not :/ the colors we choose for our homes, our workplaces, our personal belongings all reflect that. and we're tired of griege, and we're actively doing things about it, and that makes me feel less insane. and i know not everyone will care about this, but i can sisyphus my work until it's fun lol

Color has been disappearing from the world.

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

source paper