The hope and reassurance of yellow
Pantone is a company that (primarily) defines colors so that they can be standardized across time and space. They recently released a press release in which they announced that the color of the year for 2009 would be "Mimosa," a warm, engaging yellow, because, "In a time of economic uncertainty and political change, optimism is
paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than
yellow.
After that, though, I (of course) started noticing (and buying) more books with electric green covers. There wasn't a subject or author connection at all... they were just a neat color that I had a positive association with.
What exactly is my point, vis-a-vis WorldCat?
Only that book covers (and by association, the colors thereof) can be important, interesting, arresting, etc. After reading of Pantone's choice for color of the year, I spent some time making a list of books with predominantly yellow covers. This took me longer in Web-land than it would have just wandering the stacks, because it's hard to tell what color cover a book will have from a title, subject or author. In real life, I could have simply walked up and down rows of books and yanked ones off the shelf that met this simple, chromatic criteria.
There are some neat Web resources for working with color -- the mash-ups of krazydad like colrpickr and coverpop come to mind -- but the real impact of a book's cover is felt much, much more strongly in real life than in a picture online.
The whole exercise was a reminder to me that libraries have one enormous advantage over information sources online: they are real places. As useful as Google, Flickr, del.ico.us, Twitter, etc. are... I can't go "hang out at the Google." There are ways to use physical space -- color being one of them -- that can have a much greater impact than the closest equivalent online.
What would the impact of a wall, shelf or table of yellow books be? Chosen only because yellow is (according to industry sources) a color of "hope and reassurance?" It's not going to be the way most people find the information they're looking for... but in a physical space, maybe it's a touch of optimism that simply can't be completely replicated on the Web.
Only that book covers (and by association, the colors thereof) can be important, interesting, arresting, etc. After reading of Pantone's choice for color of the year, I spent some time making a list of books with predominantly yellow covers. This took me longer in Web-land than it would have just wandering the stacks, because it's hard to tell what color cover a book will have from a title, subject or author. In real life, I could have simply walked up and down rows of books and yanked ones off the shelf that met this simple, chromatic criteria.
There are some neat Web resources for working with color -- the mash-ups of krazydad like colrpickr and coverpop come to mind -- but the real impact of a book's cover is felt much, much more strongly in real life than in a picture online.
The whole exercise was a reminder to me that libraries have one enormous advantage over information sources online: they are real places. As useful as Google, Flickr, del.ico.us, Twitter, etc. are... I can't go "hang out at the Google." There are ways to use physical space -- color being one of them -- that can have a much greater impact than the closest equivalent online.
What would the impact of a wall, shelf or table of yellow books be? Chosen only because yellow is (according to industry sources) a color of "hope and reassurance?" It's not going to be the way most people find the information they're looking for... but in a physical space, maybe it's a touch of optimism that simply can't be completely replicated on the Web.
On February 16, 2009 at 12:59 PM jimmy thomas said:
hey Andy,
another "neat web resource" for playing with colors in flickr. we should do something like this with one of our jacket art databases to approximate the physical-book experience you described here.
-jimmy