Colours are amazing things, useful on so many occasions. Whether you’re a sports fan deciding who to cheer for, an artist looking at your palette or a racist deciding who to throw a stone at, colours are essential.
2008 was a great year for colours, with many new ones being discovered and invented. Some were rubbish, while others were superb. So which were the colours that epitomised the year of our Lord, 2008? Let me kick them at you like a farmer kicks a chicken. (Hard)
1: Elaborate Orange
Elaborate Orange was the winner of Good Housekeeping Magazine’s annual “Design a Colour, You Dicks!” competition. This entry, which won its creator, Mandy Higgins, $150 and an apron, has a tangy foretaste and elements of surprise.
2: Spink
Spink is what you get when twenty thousand Eastern European refugees walk across a red carpet. To see it is to faint with ecstasy. I’m fluttering now just writing about it.
3: Tragically Hip: The Colour
Invented by Canadian rockers The Tragically Hip, this colour was featured on all the band’s promotional material last year, including album covers and tour t-shirts. It’s a bit like mauve, but with a deeper quality of feeling and an understandable sense of injustice at the inequities of the world.
4: White
When the International Colour Foundation upgraded White’s status from ‘absence of colour’ to ‘actual colour’ last year, fans of this much-maligned hue rejoiced. And with good reason! It’s responsible for eggs (except brown ones and those weird speckly ones) and 90% of the world’s supply of blank printer paper.
5: Matthew, Prince of Beaumontford
When a minor British royal gave birth to a small, undulating ball of colour, the Queen decided to give it a title and treat it as if it were a real royal child, instead of feeding it to her corgis as her advisors suggested. MPB (as it’s known in colour-fan circles) is a cross between red and green, but tinged with sadness.
6: Twitter Black
This is the colour that your fingers and thumbs turn to when you spend all day sending text updates to your blog. Twitter Black is a good indication that you’re about to die, and so comes sixth in my list.
7: Charonesque
Few will forget the events of May, when a beautiful asexual alien appeared in a field in Kentucky and promised to reveal the secrets of universal peace and eternal joy to the assembled media and political representatives. ‘Charonesque’ is the name given to the colour of the mysterious matter that emanated from his hands, flying over the land in dovetail-shaped majesty and instilling a sense of awe, wonder and love in everyone present, up until the alien was shot seventeen times by the American military and taken away for testing.
8: Blutt
Now that it’s impossible for many people’s teeth to become any whiter, dentists developed this new colour, which is several shades more transparent than regular white. Complicated surgery is the only way you can get your teeth to be Blutt, and it hurts like a barbed-wire condom.
9: Extreme Lilac
Do you think you’ve seen lilac before? YOU HAVEN’T!!!! You haven’t seen ANY COLOUR AT ALL until you’ve seen EXTREME LILAC!!! EXTREME LILAC is MORE LILAC than ANY LILAC you’ve EVER SEEN!!!! It’s more lilac than A THOUSAND TONNES OF LILAC FUCKING A LILAC SEAL!!! IN SPACE!!!!
10: Green of Anne Gables
Designed to coincide with the anniversary of a book that people love despite having never read, Green of Anne Gables is a new kind of green that looks like a tree barfing up a lawn. Only greener.
Showing posts with label Colours. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colours. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Friday, 21 December 2007
The Top Ten Colours of the Year
Now that Pantone have announced their colour of the year for 2008, I feel it is my duty to reveal The Imaginary Review's top ten new colours for the past twelve months. I do these things because I care.
1) Cock-heap Pink
It was impossible to move this year without bumping into something that was Cock-Heap pink. Walls, t-shirts, foodstuffs, even hipsters starting dyeing their hair the colour of a heap of cocks. Developed by paint scientists in conjunction with Vivid Entertainment pornographic movie studios, Cock-Heap Pink is THE colour of 2007.
2) Gribbon
Gribbon is an entirely new colour unlike any other refractive light effect that the brain has interpreted by assigning a mental visual category to, ever. As such, it's completely invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen with a special camera that converts light into music, music into eggs and the eggs back into colours. While somewhat messy, Gribbon is now the national colour of Tanzania.
3) Avocado Suicide
Nobody has ever seen the colour Avocado Suicide, but it's always there, lurking behind sofas and inside volcanoes. Shying away from humans, this colour came to international prominence when it was detected by celebrity psychic Derek Acorah in March.
4) Mental Brown
Another laboratory-created colour, Mental Brown is 40% heavier than other colours and has a definite refraction index of around point 4. This means that it looks particularly nice in kitchens.
5) Wikihue
When the project to create a new colour using the collaborative efforts of internet users was announced, critics scoffed. And then the people acted, and added splashes and dashes of all kinds of different colours together in one giant month-long colour creation exercise. The result? A dirty black mess and some smug grins from the critics.
6) Parodius Purple
'Parodius' was a Japanese Super Nintendo game that was a parody of side-scrolling shoot-em-ups like R-Type. Parodius Purple is a colour somewhere between lilac and eggplant.
7) Yello Yellow
Crazed Teutonic dance music pioneers Yello, creators of 1980s hit singles 'Oh Yeah' and 'The Race' have moved into colour invention. Unsurprisingly, their first effort is a take on their own namesake, yellow. Yello Yellow is a fantastic creation with a catchy bassline and which samples 'Doctor Beat' by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. Ideal for window frames.
8) The Colour of Love
This year, scientists discovered the colour of love and bottled it. It's a bit like turquoise.
9) Rhymeswith Orange
Rhymeswith Orange is something of a paradox. Apparently nothing rhymes with orange, but here's something that is Rhymeswith Orange. When this paint was released in America, it was immediately removed from the shelves as it caused many shoppers' heads to explode. That's one reason why it made its way on to my list. The other is because it smells nice.
10) Omnigreen
After an explosion in a nanobot factory knocked over a wall in a paint factory, nanobots began inventing their own colour with which they proceeded to cover everything on the planet. For two days in August, everything was omnigreen until the governments arranged for giant sprays to clean everything. Even now the colour can be seen in areas that weren't cleaned, including house foundations and France.
1) Cock-heap Pink
It was impossible to move this year without bumping into something that was Cock-Heap pink. Walls, t-shirts, foodstuffs, even hipsters starting dyeing their hair the colour of a heap of cocks. Developed by paint scientists in conjunction with Vivid Entertainment pornographic movie studios, Cock-Heap Pink is THE colour of 2007.
2) Gribbon
Gribbon is an entirely new colour unlike any other refractive light effect that the brain has interpreted by assigning a mental visual category to, ever. As such, it's completely invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen with a special camera that converts light into music, music into eggs and the eggs back into colours. While somewhat messy, Gribbon is now the national colour of Tanzania.
3) Avocado Suicide
Nobody has ever seen the colour Avocado Suicide, but it's always there, lurking behind sofas and inside volcanoes. Shying away from humans, this colour came to international prominence when it was detected by celebrity psychic Derek Acorah in March.
4) Mental Brown
Another laboratory-created colour, Mental Brown is 40% heavier than other colours and has a definite refraction index of around point 4. This means that it looks particularly nice in kitchens.
5) Wikihue
When the project to create a new colour using the collaborative efforts of internet users was announced, critics scoffed. And then the people acted, and added splashes and dashes of all kinds of different colours together in one giant month-long colour creation exercise. The result? A dirty black mess and some smug grins from the critics.
6) Parodius Purple
'Parodius' was a Japanese Super Nintendo game that was a parody of side-scrolling shoot-em-ups like R-Type. Parodius Purple is a colour somewhere between lilac and eggplant.
7) Yello Yellow
Crazed Teutonic dance music pioneers Yello, creators of 1980s hit singles 'Oh Yeah' and 'The Race' have moved into colour invention. Unsurprisingly, their first effort is a take on their own namesake, yellow. Yello Yellow is a fantastic creation with a catchy bassline and which samples 'Doctor Beat' by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. Ideal for window frames.
8) The Colour of Love
This year, scientists discovered the colour of love and bottled it. It's a bit like turquoise.
9) Rhymeswith Orange
Rhymeswith Orange is something of a paradox. Apparently nothing rhymes with orange, but here's something that is Rhymeswith Orange. When this paint was released in America, it was immediately removed from the shelves as it caused many shoppers' heads to explode. That's one reason why it made its way on to my list. The other is because it smells nice.
10) Omnigreen
After an explosion in a nanobot factory knocked over a wall in a paint factory, nanobots began inventing their own colour with which they proceeded to cover everything on the planet. For two days in August, everything was omnigreen until the governments arranged for giant sprays to clean everything. Even now the colour can be seen in areas that weren't cleaned, including house foundations and France.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
