A lot of this stuff is just designers imitating each other. You see this a lot in web design where every website uses similar colors, fonts, visual language etc. I've worked with a few good designers that do actual original design where the point is to be different in a tasteful way. Standing out from the grey masses. If you get a lot of people copying each other, it all averages out to the same bland/boring stuff.

A lot of Hollywood productions these days are sequels, re-runs, and endless variations of successful movies. Down to copying stylistic elements, color grading, etc.

I love Tim Burton and Wes Anderson as directors. Both use vibrant, saturated colors and have a very recognizable style. Tim Burton uses lush, saturated colors to portray suburbs (many of his movies feature lush green lawns white picket fences, etc.).

And Wes Anderson has his famous style of exactly centered subjects,using a lot of surrealist visuals, and elaborate sets and models. I loved the little Roald Dahl thing he did on Netflix two years ago or so (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) where all of this was on display. If you haven't seen that, worth a watch.

"Color has always had a strange status in Western philosophy — and more often than not, that status is second-class."

I wonder if one big change is a shift from a more working class family focus to an upper class influencer focus. Maybe this is just because was a kid, but It does feel to me like as a kid in the 80's and 90's and probably earlier, that the middle class was essentially the aspiration, and everything was geared towards the middle class family, think happy meals and McDonald's play place. Now, everything is geared for the wealthy social media influencer's, it's not a meal, it's an experience.

I live in South Africa, and when I traveled to the Netherlands on holiday last year, I was quite taken aback at how muted everyone's clothing was.

It is definitely not like that here - everything from our flag down is full of color.

It's a cute article, but I don't think it holds up under scrutiny. I suspect it is much more a collection of unrelated reasons:

* Historical objects in museums are likely more colorful because we cared to preserve the most visually striking objects. Classic survivorship bias.

* Music has less dynamic range than in early recordings because producers were competing to be the loudest sounding song on the radio (see "loudness wars"). Those wars are actually over now and dynamic range has been increasing for about a decade.

* There is a whole lot going on behind trends in cinematographer color grading if you look into that world. But in the example here, I think it's largely that audiences expected "muted brown" as the color grade to send a "period film" signal. Witness also how every medieval or fantasy movie feels compelled to have all of the castle walls bare gray rock when they were in fact plastered and brightly colored. Likewise Roman architecture being alabaster white. Audiences wouldn't believe a Roman movie with painted statues or a fantasy film with colorful castle walls.

* Cars have muted colors because consumers moved towards a model where they sell cars every few years. When purchasing a car, they choose neutral colors to maximize resale value. Also, I think cars are simply much less a part of someone's social identity and status symbol and more of a utilitarian object than they they used to be. (Witness that when people buy expensive sports cars, those are more likely to be brightly colored.)

* Interior design trends come and go, but I think one of the drivers of gray walls was that it became a popular style for Airbnb rentals to avoid turning off potential renters. That led it to become associated with internationalism and modernity, and from there it sort of took off. Also, an increasing number of people are renting and are simply unable to paint their walls more interesting colors.

For those not in on Twitter lore I want to point out that the post is written by a well known white nationalist/neo-nazi dog whistling account.

Interestingly, there was a specific printing technology for expanding the palette of colour printing, Hexachrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachrome

Tried several times to use it in projects, but the customer always balked at the additional plate charges, even when they _loved_ the added vibrancy and colour range.

The only printer I know of who was actually successful using it to make money was in London --- took on spot colour jobs from other printers when the spot colour was inside the expanded Hexachrome gamut, allowing for a faster turn-around (jobs on the same stock were ganged up) and no charge for washing down a press to change out the ink.

Am I the only one who thought the lead photo should have included Gen 1 iMac vs. latest lineup? Even the 2021 anodized aluminum version is comparatively muted!

> It’s not just cars — a study of over 7,000 objects in the UK’s Science Museum found that the colors of consumer goods have been steadily neutralized since 1800. Bright, saturated tones have been giving way to gray, beige, and taupe for centuries.

That is... not what that first chart ("Percent of pixels") shows? Much the opposite — reddish beige to taupe dominated the 1800s and slowly dwindled to ~20% by 2020. Meanwhile, greens and blues became a lot more common from 1960 onward.

To this article's credit, it does acknowledge the shift towards industrial materials, but it's still worth reading the article [0] where this chart originates. The nature of photographing objects contributes to the wider range of brown hues in older objects:

> The wide range of colours in the telegraph comes in large part from the mahogany wood used in its construction. But the colours also come from its shape (the rounded pillars reflect light and create shadows) as well as its age (the wear and tear creates colour variations).

whereas more recent objects trend toward smaller sizes and homogenous materials that photograph more evenly:

> In contrast, the metal and plastic materials in the iPhone give much less variation. It also has a more basic shape and is in better condition.

The pure grayscale band at the top of that chart has expanded significantly, but (variation in beige-ishness aside) can you really say that the left side of the graph is much less homogenous?

[0] https://lab.sciencemuseum.org.uk/colour-shape-using-computer...

My wife convinced me that we should buy a dark gray car cause it would be less obviously dirty. I deeply regret not trying harder to convince her back, so we'd get a bright red or yellow one instead. It's super hard to find the car back on a parking lot and who cares when it's dirty? Bright colors are nice. I'm now trying to compensate by only buying colorful clothing going forward.

I won't pretend to be an expert on the cultural aspects of this, but the most compelling historical proof they have of their thesis is that chart showing the measurement of hue over a whole bunch of objects in museums, by era.

Is it possible this is a bit of... https://xkcd.com/1138/ ? The Y axis is 100% because you can only look at the objects we have, but that doesn't reflect the fact we don't have 100% of objects from 1800. We only have the objects we cared enough about to protect.

So... in someways, (in no way proof of anything) this could show the opposite? We produce a lot of junky monochrome things that get thrown away fast, and things that we care enough to protect for generations tend to be coloured. We're sort of seeing the half-life of things by colour in that chart.