Top
Best
New

Posted by trevin 4/2/2025

Why is the world losing color?(www.culture-critic.com)
324 points | 295 commentspage 4
galkk 4/2/2025|
They take Napoleon, as recent film with bleak colors.

I will take latest matrix. The movie was awful, of course, but I was in awe of its bright, vivid, wonderful color work. If only plot was better.

hakaneskici 4/2/2025||
I wonder if seeing the world through digital screens had any effect on this.

Biologically, color drives behavior. Exposure to the same color palette over time develops tolerance, so *different* colors might be perceived as more attractive.

I believe each individual is unique in their color perception and emotional response, but there's obviously a shared social aspect of it too.

That said, it's interesting to see the young generation's artistic preferences, which reminds me of 90's for some reason :)

SirMaster 4/3/2025||
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.

Waterluvian 4/2/2025||
Does this attempt to normalize for the possible case that colour is overrepresented in older art because pigments were so precious? Do we see a lot more purple represented than we should have expected to if we went further back than 1800? And as it became cheaper, it’s less novel and less interesting to utilize?
dudinax 4/2/2025||
It's the Seattlefication of the world.
jakub_g 4/2/2025||
The chart with car colors has been famous for a few years. However I'm seeing an inverse trend in past 1-2 years (at least in France); new cars are getting very colorful. For example:

- Renault Clio is very popular in metallic orange

- Renault 5 e-tech in bright yellow and green

- MG in aqua/azure blue

- Peugeot 208 in dark yellow and blue and dark red

Ylpertnodi 4/2/2025|
Is there a case to be made for 'well, that's what we had the most colour of...', with regards to manufacturers...of the paint, that'll sell it cheap, just to get rid?
RandyOrion 4/3/2025||
Interesting observation.

I prefer things with low color contrast in general, just to leave some color space for important things. Maybe this preference stems from the time I tweak color themes in IDEs.

In contrast, I also found more and more photography pieces which show vibrant colors and high color contrasts.

lurk2 4/2/2025||
I’ve certainly noticed this in film and interior design (most AirBnBs will have a familiar grayscale palette), but the opposite trend has occurred in software. Windows 2000 was far less colorful than Windows 10, which in turn had a more saturated palette than Vista and Windows 7.
robinsonb5 4/2/2025|
And Windows 11 is significantly less colourful again. Also, you're missing out the most colourful version of all - Windows XP!

(The first thing I did with WinXP was revert it to the Win2K look - restricting the use of colour to where it's useful: namely showing me which bloody window is active.)

ryao 4/3/2025||
> Baroque art stands in direct defiance of the chromophobic worldview. It doesn’t strip down experience in the name of order, but rather builds it up — embracing sensation and structure together.

All I can say is that if it is not baroque, do not fix it.

djmips 4/3/2025|
American video games used to be that, all brown, and Japanese games tended to be more saturated and colorful. To some extent this is still be true but I've noticed a willingness now to break out of the bleak color grading.
More comments...