This assignment was a lot of fun as I played around with different colors that I enjoyed. It was also a helpful way to play around with illustrator functions which is quickly becoming my new favorite tool.
First up the history of color, as humans we really felt the need to use all the substances around us for color purposes like using bugs and shells. Actually even colorants now such as E120 come from insects. It makes you think about all the things around us that have color and are made from a bunch of little bugs. How fun!
A lot of colors were made by accident which got me thinking about all the wonderful things invented by accident. Like discovering penicillin or something like that. The fact that mauve was being discovered by looking to create a cure for malaria and the fact that this revolutionized a whole industry in synthetic dyes.
The other idea here in color history is this idea of the people that created these dyes having a whole secret world. Color dyes were held as secrets and those had to be safeguarded somehow to stop other people from creating colors that others weren't allowed to wear. The idea of like a "dyers" code like sacred rules that you should not break when creating dyes also gives rise to these new color combinations that were almost sacrilegious.
In terms of colors and their meanings themselves, they all have interesting psychological meanings. For example Red is a very responsive color - there’s like an elemental feel to it. Even in sports like teams that wear red more have statistically won more games on average.The Virgin Mary kinda changed the cultural tone of blue, which based on a few paintings here and there became a decision that changed the world, due to it’s now prevalent color gendering choices.
The future of color at least in what I’ve seen has so many interesting use cases in science. Vantablack for example - absorbs more light than anything else on earth. The connection between color and the light it interacts with especially in the case of Vantablack is so crucial as we use light and color to give us information about the surrounding area. Even more recently a researcher created a new shade of white which reflects more light than anything else and it has so many applications in terms of energy saving and reflection tactics.