I miss the 90s and the wild, loud colours the landscape of the future was supposed to be painted in. Now everything is off-white or grey.

Not sure it's worth a whole blog post, but I think we have more ways to express ourselves than ever... the color hasn't gone, it's moved.

I might resell my house or my car but my PC is a like looking into a rainbow supernova. My clothes have patterns and prints that weren't even technically possible 100 years ago. I can go buy paint for my walls at any hardware store that would cost a fortune during the renaissance. I can print any artwork I want at home at amazing quality or pay a little more for an even better pro print. I've got a number of screens in my house that can reproduce more colors than I can differentiate.

The world is more colorful than ever, I don't think we have to point to the tired car examples or temporary trends in home decoration or filmmaking and claim something's missing.

"Millennial Gray" is a somewhat derogatory term that describes the interior decorating in many people's homes. It seems to be a generational thing. I think color will come back as Gen Z and Gen Alpha get older and become more dominant in the economy.

80% of developers on StackOverflow are unhappy and burned out and I don’t think they are thinking about colors and the brightness of life. Bored Ape has become a symbol of an era where many people's dreams have shattered and they have turned into a grey mass. The diversity of colors is a symbol of joy and freedom. The wars have swept across the world and now entire countries like Ukraine have lost all color because the colors of war are gray and black, and there are people who impose shades of gray because they are only interested in money and don’t care about colors.

When it comes to things like cars and room interiors, neutral colors have a much better resale value because they appeal to people more widely. For cars, vibrant colors might mean higher insurance rates (red cars are associated with sports cars, young drivers and aggressive driving).

Random thoughts.

Movies: Movies descended from live theater, which was not realistic by definition, so things had to be attention-getting in order to draw people into the reality of the story, including use of color. Older movies, and older colorful movies, were closer to that tradition and therefore kept some of that impressionism, which faded as "realism" became the thing to do in movies.

Cars: Searching online I found this chart: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev... - and ... it seems that people stopped buying green and purple cars and are buying black, white, and silver instead, with red/burgundy varying somewhat over time. A paragraph here - https://www.colorwithleo.com/why-isnt-green-a-popular-car-co... - provides something insightful:

"Historical Perceptions of Green Cars

For many decades, green was seen as an unappealing and sometimes odd choice for vehicle color. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, green was associated with military and industrial vehicles, which didn’t make it an attractive option for personal cars. The green paints used on older vehicles also tended to fade and discolor over time, giving the color a reputation for looking worn and dated. This perception lingered for many years, and made consumers wary of choosing green for their own cars."

But not sure how true that is and not sure it would apply to the 90's--the starting time that the chart covers. I really don't remember anyone in the 90's having a green car at all, to be honest.

Logos: Company logos have been getting simpler for a long time, almost to the point where it's pretty much it's the brand name in a specific font in most cases. I recall reading about an "anti-branding" trend in logo design - https://shapesofidentity.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-anti-bra... - and that's because of lowered trust in brands overall - which is true. Brands aren't worth a damn if they can be bought and sold and the company beneath them change without notice.

HDR movies and TV have more color than old SDR stuff.

Go back and look at 80s, 90s movies and compare to 2024 movies and the 2024 movies have way more color. Except a few examples here and there that are stylized or graded that way intentionally, but those are few and far between in my experience.

Like go look at mainstream stuff like marvel movies. Those are all way more colorful than basically any movie from the 70s-2000.

I am continuously surprised by the neverending parade of white cars on the roads.

It would be nice if cars came in Hot Wheels Spectraflame. I’m sure the greigification of automobiles is down to some spreadsheet somewhere showing them they save two nickels for offering one less color.

Maybe only on surfaces. Lighting has become very colorful.

Look at modern Asian cities. Beijing is rather grey in daytime, but at night, there's colored lighting. Shenzhen, where LEDs are made, has reached insane levels of lighting effects at night. Not only do most of the skyscrapers have animated lighting effects, the effects are coordinated across the whole downtown area. Then there are frequent drone shows.

American cars are now coming stock with lighting effects previously seen on lowriders.