Ignoring the reference to the ’80s band that rocked your world with such hits as “I Adore Mi Amor” and “All 4 Love“, here’s a few great color sites I recently dug up in a Communication Arts.

In The Mod
www.inthemod.com
It doesn’t get much geekier than www.inthemod.com: an algorithmic analysis of the color palettes used by artists ranging from Josef Albers to Andy Warhol. While statistical analysis combined with Flash 8’s pixel-level color capabilities may contribute to a deeper understanding of color, it will do little to explain the genius of Jackson Pollock. Designers who wish to reduce the thousands of colors employed in a work of art to a manageable palette of similar colors can speed up the process using this nifty tool.

Colour Lovers
www.colourlovers.com
This site is a place for advertisers, art directors, product and interior designers to explore the practical applications of color, while keeping their finger on the pulse of worldwide color trends. Visitors can upload their own palettes, search for and share palettes and vote on their favorites. Among the thousands of color schemes presented, there’s one that’s bound to inspire.

Color Matters
www.colormatters.com
This site provides a resource that examines issues driving color in design, business and marketing. When it comes to logo design, brand identity and the consumer purchase process, color is hugely influential. Colormatters.com can help you choose wisely.

Lively Grey
www.livelygrey.com
This weblog is an attempt to transmit some of 20+ years the owner’s of professional color experience.

10/30/2014 Update: The site is 404 and they haven’t posted an update to their Twitter since February 2012. Looks like this service is gone. Pity.

I’d posted previously about using the Reinvigorate WordPress Plug-In and recently learned that it relies on an “onLoad” function in the Javascript. As a result, any onLoads that you have running in your WordPress Page Template will break. Thanks to Mike‘s keen eye, the rotating random spotlight photo at the top of Donline was breaking on some internal pages (specifically, the ones that incorporated the Reinvigorate WordPress Plug-In. What a shame. As a result, I’m going back to just using Statcounter and Google Analytics.

Maybe I’m just cynical because I woke up with a head-cold this week and I’m feeling miserable, but I’ve noticed a trend that’s occuring a lot lately in television advertising: companies are treating their customers like idiots.

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A few years back, my company, era//404, was written up in The Wall Street Journal’s online site, WSJ.com, for an experiment we ran concerning unsolicited email. The experiment was to test if those “Unsubscribe” links actually work. Upon creating a dozen brand new email accounts, we subscribed each to a dozen different online newsletters, contests, subscription services and mailing lists. Then, upon receiving the initial emails from those services, we clicked the “Unsubscribe” link.

What we found was that while we were removed from the initial mailing list, the inboxes were getting filled with other junk mail that we supposedly subscribed to. This meant that while the company had held true to their word on removing your address from their mail, they had taken it upon themselves to sell your email address to a number of other online list services. And why not? You were no longer of any use to them. You’d already expressed disinterest in their products or services, so what harm would it be to give their faithful ex-customers opportunities from other firms with products or services to sell, especially when they could make some money on the side.

This mentality, however disagreeable, has become the norm over the past few years. It is no longer disreputable businesses, product knock-offs, pornography and pharmaceutical sites, college diplomas or spam enterprises run by people like Spam King, Alan M. Ralsky, that you have to worry about. The ethic has run rampant among larger mainstream corporations as well.

In September 2004, we conducted the same experiment among customer-oriented businesses like credit card companies and domain name registrars and found their practices to be as bad, or worse, than the pornography businesses of yesteryear.

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