Color WOW

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

If either color or photography fascinate you as much as they do me and you have a deep pockets promotional budget, then this video explaining Canon's new ad campaign will interest you. Delight in color is universal, and our neutral interior spaces, no doubt, are largely influenced by the prolific colors available in our media and devices. Everything that I see, points to this as a continuing trend. Without question, the challenge for finishes is to both stay neutral and be interesting enough to engage the design community and consumer.

Visualizing Color

This month's Wilsonart blog reminded me of my favorite places in New York - the Kremer Pigment store. They have a delightful collection of images on their website: Colors of Nature that communicate the essence of color and help their customers "see" the colors of the pigment collection in context. What a charming marketing tool!

More Levering of Brands

As I just got back from an extended trip, I have been paying closer attention to my emails from Shutterfly.com - as creating one of their books is my favorite momento of trips and events. Today's email amused me to no end, they announced that in concert with Clairol's Root Touch-up a new root touch-up tool is available on their site. You could even try it out. Tres amusant! . . . and good marketing for both parties.

Virtual Milan II -Beauty of the Natural

Design can be thoughtful, natural and beautiful as are the vessels made of a bio-composite of flour, agricultural waste and limestone. The tactility of these classically-shaped vessels is visceral even just seeing the images on screen. These vessels from Formafantasma offer a hint to the colors that we will find comfortable in our interior environments moving forward - the limestone palette is moving to even softer warm neutrals with just a hint of delicate natural color.

Formafantasma showed at Spazio Rossana Orlandi, which seems to be the venue for the hottest looks at the fair - it goes to the top of the list for the next real trip to Milan.

Color draws Customers

In product development, we talk about "color" all the time - even if we are talking about hundreds of variations on beige. An article on ABC news gives us just a little history on the consumers' interest in color:

"In the early 1980s, the Gap became the first major retailer to show clothes folded on tables, not hangers, to show people the colors"

Now we know, we owe our color awareness to the GAP and our own ability to manipulate color on our computers adds to this awareness everyday. But, what is more important is the fact that the Gap uses color to draw customers into the store to buy their most important product - jeans. Jeans are mainly variations on a shade with slight variety in shape. Reminds me of our industry... yes - variations on beige sell just like jeans, but you have to draw attention to your offering in someway because everyone offers the same beiges. As Gap shows, carefully selected and featured color is a powerful tool to do just that.

Sherwin-Williams top-ranked brand

The interior finish world is a wide-reaching but fragmented industry, so it was fascinating to see one of our own in the Interbrand top 50 leading brands. Sherwin Williams came in at # 28, which is quite a feat during the recent economic downturn, but paint is a quick and inexpensive pick-up for any interior space.

Ranking were based on:

• financial performance
• consumer brand preference surveys and
  
• brand strength

As a follower of interior finishes in the marketplace, I have been continuously impressed by Sherwin Williams targeted marketing to the design trade. Their "Color Snap®" app were one of the first iphone apps in the industry.They achieved this rating as a singular product with their biggest competitors being mass merchants Home Depot at #4 and Lowe's at #12. In today's market, all the major paint companies make amazing marketing efforts, but congratulations goes to Sherwin-Williams for showing up so high on the Interbrand list.

Cheap plastic/Well designed too!

A few years ago, I replaced my cheap plastic colander with a classic metal one, while it is attractive, I never use it. It is clunky, heavy and awkward to use. Now the old cheap plastic one is so beat up that I am afraid that it harbors germs. In my recent trip to Target, I found a solution - another cheap plastic one that also happens to be beautiful.

It really doesn't take that much to delight me and I found this simple threesome of colanders designed by Michael Graves to be just delightful. There are truly few things these days that are this inexpensive, functional and attractive at the same time. As I have said before, companies that I have worked for in the past do not believe in making inexpensive things beautiful. Seeing this on my counter is a simple pleasure that puts a smile on my face, and anyone involved with interior finish products would do well to ask themselves: Do my products put a smile on my customers' faces?

Of course, it could just be that in the dead of the New England winter, the fresh grass green makes me think of spring and warmer weather hopefully to come soon.

Is Color making a return this time around??

After a long decade of beige, and more beige, color would occasionally rear its head, but never for long. Will it stick around this time? Last night at the Golden Globes the gowns ushered in what might become a reign of purples in fashion. It will be tentative at first, but the first shot for color's return in home furnishings was fired by the New York Times today with an article about Hella Jongerius: Daring to Play with a Rich Palette. “'Color can bring richness, beauty and ambiguity to design, if it is used well,” she explained. “But most designers use the same colors again and again, mostly ones that are too bright, too kitschy, too gray, or too cold.'” The problem, or so Ms. Jongerius believes, is that most industrial designers don’t know how to use color. Ms. Jongerius suspects that other designers fail to make the most of color because they weren’t taught how to do so. Another problem, she says, is the influence of color forecasters, who tend to predict future trends (as their clients ask them to) rather than making considered decisions about individual colors, and how they will work together across a company’s products."

20 years ago, when colors were simply out of the paint box, color forecasters color predictions served a definite use, but as materials and textures became more complex and layered, forecasters predictions came to be less user-friendly for most products and manufacturers. I marveled at the hundreds of trend pieces that greeted 2010 with Pantone's predictions of a "turquoise" year. Interesting - but I wouldn't take that to the bank. Color, light and material are so inexorably tied together, that color cannot be considered as an entirely separate entity. The furniture manufacturer Vitra and Jongerius worked together on a color research project to help them understand the use of color in their products. Find a fascinating essay on the topic and images of the process at Jongerius's website.

At Corian, we started looking at the color gaps in the palette in July of 2007. It was obvious at the time that we were missing some of nature's happier hues. I suspect that the recent downturn had something to do with the fact that several of these colors were finally implemented for a 2010 introduction. The image above is of my very first analysis, but we never got past the first iteration during my tenure there as we continued to introduce more and more beige based on focus group favorites. Although neutrals will continue to sell best, color is still one of the best ways to stimulate interest in any product and to stand out from the competition.

Color at Brimfield

The "Lampshade Lady" (image on left) uses classic Marimekko and other vintage fabrics and postcards from the distant past when people still sent them to friends and family from their vacation. I wonder whether the greetings sent by way of cell phone photos will have such staying power. This master of remixing teaches her craft in a just-published book: The Lampshade Lady's Guide to Lighting Up Your Life: 50 Custom Lampshades and Lamps and the fresh, though classic, bright colors in her booth made it stand out from all the rest. Find her online at Lake's Lampshades.

The other brightly colored booth (shown on the right) that commanded attention had a hint of deco feel to it, but the bright colors of the frames were strictly contemporary. The reds and purples shown here are fashion-forward for the world of home furnishing, but parallel those of haute couture. The frames add the spice and are the perfect dose of color for the moment. Color is the ultimate "legal" mood enhancer, I see more of it to come.

And then there was the booth of tie-dyed clothing, (in honor of the anniversary of Woodstock - no doubt) I doubt we will be seeing that fashion in the home furnishings arena any time soon. But it was still fun to see.

Missing Color/ Fond Memories

After years of creating beige on beige products, I have come to realize that I miss the joy of color. The point to me of creating neutral building materials is that they were merely the canvas or at most a foil to other personal expressions. The color and personality was to be supplied with other materials and art, but somehow the late 90's and 00's were almost devoid of the balance that color could bring to wall board and concrete. Sometimes texture loaded on texture just isn't enough to feed the soul. Color can do that in the most personal way.

Today, I was given quite a jolt of a reminder in Harvard Square. I had been reading that the place that I always had thought of as quaint and interesting was now as interesting as your local mall - nearly devoid of personality. I should have know that the writers lamenting the demise of the square had it right, when I immediately found a parking space. I shed many a tear and got many a parking ticket in the years that I was calling on architects in the Square because parking spaces were so hard to come by.

I had heard that Crate and Barrel which was in the old "Design Research" building was closed but was presently surprised that the owner of the building had used the famous frameless windows wisely and had installed a striking presentation of classic Marimekko fabrics and clothing in all the colorful glory of an era past.

Does fashion still influence interior finishes?

As I trolled the mall yesterday with an eye tuned only to trends, I asked myself if fashion still had any influence on interior finishes or any other building products. I did some homework to track some of the past that influenced today's products, and was surprised at the direct influence of fashion up until this time. The above collage is the trajectory of trends that I uncovered from my own reports of global trade shows and media over the last 4+ years.

Of course everything has changed, the September issues of the fashion magazines are terribly conservative, and I doubt that will take nearly as long to translate to interior finishes as the "metal as color" trend took.

Color does Matter

While I knew from the time that the first limestone displays showed up at building material trade shows that this was the future of interior finishes, I admit to getting bored by the idea after more than 15 years. Year after year, we would develop an interesting palette of colors to put in front of focus groups. Year after year the focus groups would select the same non-color as their preference. The product introductions became indistinguishable from year to year as did the marketplace interest in our product. A possible further consequence is that the understanding of color in the design community may have disappeared along with any semblance of a color palette.

Why do I say this? I almost overdosed on museums last week, I am apt to do that when company is in town. Art museums are usually a totally aesthetically immersive experience for me. "Prendergast in Italy" and Edward Steichen at Williams College Museum of Art presented the opportunity for a fabulous twofer. The art did not disappoint, in fact both shows were overwhelming in both quality and quantity. Or maybe it just seemed that the quantity was overwhelming because the COLOR of the background walls in the exhibits were so totally wrong that it overpowered the art and diminished the viewing experience. For years, museums have moved away from off-white walls in special blockbuster exhibits, to palettes that enhanced the artwork and the total viewing experience. As a color designer, I always have found the colors selected to be in perfect harmony with the art being shown, this time the background colors were not even close. The strong peachy apricot and aqua colors used as background for "Prendergast in Italy" were not only reminiscent of Howard Johnson's logo colors but made the subtle colors that the artist used in his watercolors look washed out and murky. The Steichen sepia prints were framed in dark natural wood presented on a background the color of photo gray paper. Just the slightest amount of warmth in the wall paint would have harmonized so much better with the prints. I have to make a guess and say that the person selecting the wall color had absolutely no understanding of COLOR.

The same focus groups also told us, that despite the fact that the competition had more exciting products, they ended up using our product because the colors were "right on." Color does matter, but it appears that some in the design community have forgotten this fact.

All that being said, the Williams Museum of Art is a fabulous place, and along with the Clark and MASS MoCA makes Williamstown, MA a must visit spot for the art lover.

Added 8/10: Sherwin Williams, the paint company, in their current newsletter to the design community STIR addresses the issue of appropriate paint colors as background to art in an article entitled: Does Art Make the Walls or Do the Walls Make the Art?

Turn Color into Poetry

Color is playful! Color is fun! Color is profound? Paint manufacturers all offer infinite color on demand in a mostly commodity item, but each as found a creative way to engage those that arrive at their website. This is Benjamin Moore's entry into the paint wars, and it is charming for the wordsmiths among us. Turn one of the selected words into your favorite color and leave your thoughts on the word and color combination behind for posterity. Consumer engagement at its best.

Why hasn't someone thought of this before?

These charming hand-knotted stair treads with coordinating runners by Liza Phillips Design are both clever and beautiful, and from my perspective - the most unique product at this year's ICFF. Every stair has a separate color and design to be arranged at will, and Liza Phillips artistic sensibility is apparent in each design and natural colorway. These exquisitely colored rugs are hand-spun and pot dyed in Tibet. Another collection is hand-tufted in India of New Zealand wool in undyed natural tones. Both collections are made without child labor.

Long Live Crayola

TheDieline, which bills itself as the #1 packaging design website, features a story of the history of Crayola's packaging. I guess that I am not alone with my obsession over my boxes of Crayola's, is it nostalgia or just simply great branding over the continued lifetime of a product? Since Hallmark purchased the company, they have great presence on mass merchandisher shelves.

Barbie love/ "Mangenta" love?

If creativity is putting disparate ideas together, then Chloe Ruchon has hit the jackpot with "Barbie foot at the DMY Berlin Design Festival 09 . Yes, Barbie has returned to her German roots. Designboom has even more images and sees deep meaning here, but I will leave that up to each reader. We know that there is nothing more dear to European men's heart than Soccer. Then does Europe's "mangenta" love (or pepto bismal pink love) simply infer Barbie love?

The indoor "babyfoot bonzini" game is available in a wide range of aesthetics including custom themes.

Magenta - For a Reason or a Season?

I painted my house door magenta for a reason - I had absolutely no trend in mind. When the beach roses are in full bloom, there is simply no other choice. A recent Wall Street Journal article tells us that "magenta" is "suddenly haute" in everything from fashion to architecture for just this season in an article entitled: Hot Pink? Call it 'Mangenta.' They have it right when they explain: "The fuchsia phenomenon might not age really well. Yet that's precisely the point -- fuchsia is so very here today because tomorrow is so scary to think about. The color of hothouse flowers and glorious summer landscapes speaks to our bruised psyches. Brown is bleak. Fuchsia is anything but." I guess the concept of optimism would explain Bill Clinton's pink tie on the cover of the 5/31 New York Times Magazine, but it still does not explain all that pepto bismal pink coming out of the European design community on everything from furnishings to finishes.

Connecting to the customer

Designed with the consumer in mind, Sherwin Williams has a fun new interactive tool called "The Color of Inspiration." Even if not totally satisfying, it is a start to the conversation of selecting colors for the home. It only lets you pick one color from a photograph that "inspires" you and picks the rest of the palette for you. Not for those who expect subtlety, but entertaining non the less. I put an entry under "chimera" and will see once it is on line, if it lets me create more palettes with the picture in the "community" part of the program.

Looks like the right way to use the internet and a smart way to engage the customer who is looking for color suggestions and actually send them to the store for the promoted product.

"Project Runway" Tenor of the Times

2007 BC (before chaos-financial ) Style over Substance wins
2008 AD (after demise-of Wall Street) Talent and hard work win

More than any other "Reality TV" 2008 Project Runway has captured the times in which we live and is a hopeful guidepost to the future. Only in hindsight do we realize that 2007 Project Runway's winner did the same; the winner's "style over substance" captured the immediate times. Did the darkness of the collection foresee what was in store, just a year later? The numbers of viewers of the presidential debate may have eclipsed the viewers of the 2008 Project Runway finale, but we can only hope that these lessons are as prescient as those of 2007 - this would not be the first time that fashion portends the future. And did Leanne's use of sustainable fabrics cinch the deal for her? If Leanne's win of the 2008 Project Runway with talent and hard work - without even a speck of attitude and posturing speaks to the future - bring it on sooner rather than later.

Newly revived Wright Palette

When I purchased my 1890's Victorian house, the interior colors were comfortable and tasteful, if not exactly to my liking. I knew that the colors were not Victorian, but couldn't quite figure out their provenance until I toured Wright's Unity Temple in Oak Park. There was the palette that the previous owners had used throughout the house.

Suitable for today's organic aesthetic, Pittsburgh Paints has introduced a palette of Wright colors - the Fallingwater Inspired Colors. These colors have the same spirit that is present in Oak Park, with the inspiration that Wright found in the central Pennsylvania mountains. The colors have been authenticated by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the caretakers for Fallingwater. The area and house are well worth a weekend adventure.