What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is basically online scrapbooking. It’s an invitation-only network, so to get started just ping someone who’s already on Pinterest (like me, joodstew), and they will invite you in.

Once you’re in, simply install a “Pin it!” bookmarklet in your favorite Web browser. From that point on, any time you see a gorgeous photo online, simply click “Pin it!” and a popup window will appear, allowing you to add that photo to one of several photo collections, or “boards,” you maintain on Pinterest.

If you happen to pin an image from a retail site with a price associated with it, your image will also appear in Pinterest’s Gifts section with price listed.

Pinterest operates on a follower-following basis, just like Facebook and Twitter. You can jump-start your Pinterest network by connecting your FB and Twitter user names. That will populate your Pinterest wall with your friends’ pinned images, and show your pins to people who follow you. From there, the acceleration effect kicks in: you can repin images you like, comment on them, or simply “like” them (which doesn’t commit them to any of your boards; it’s sort of a shopping-cart option for images you may or may want to keep permanently).

To stoke your madly pretty collecting urge further, download the Pinterest mobile app and pin during idle minutes via your iPhone or Android phone.

What benefits does Pinterest offer, and to whom?

Pinterest scratches the itch of anyone visually minded who wants to collect evocative images for various purposes and share them with like-minded folks. Put in plain English, here are some of Pinterest’s target audiences and motivations:

Brides gather hairstyle images, shop for flowers, dresses, for their big day — everything they shop for. Brides get monster mileage out of Pinterest, and retailers have definitely noticed.

Moms gather DIY project ideas for kids, promising recipes to try later, clothes they’re shopping for, inspirational quotes of all kinds. This group also fuels a lot of retailer site traffic if they ultimately buy the stuff they’ve collected or shared via Pinterest.

From PoodlePoddle

Interior decorators share beautiful home designs, collect furniture and home-interior products they recommend, assemble and share color palettes for every room in the home. Here’s a one-stop place to stoke their clients with pricey, tantalizing ideas that will hopefully turn into paying projects.

Retailers can use Google Analytics and other site-traffic tools to see which sites are sending them the most traffic in any given month. If Product A is submitted by someone to Pinterest, it may well catch fire with the community, getting pinned and repinned. All those collective eyeballs can simply click back to the original retailer’s site to buy — and many do.

From my Should I Buy This? board

Infographic-makers can submit their thought-provoking graphs to Pinterest and watch the referral traffic (hopefully) roll in. However, as the above indicates, Pinterest skews heavily toward affluent adult women — pictures of killer crankshafts or infographics that don’t speak to this demographic may fizzle with this audience fast.

Why should designers and color fans care?

Pinterest sits at a crossroads right now. It captures the DIY-handmade aesthetic (and associated shopping urge) of Etsy. As its collected images diversify from the merely cutesy, it could become a super-charged version of Flickr.

From fffound.com via Thao Huynh

Most crucially for designers, this is an images-driven social community. In other words, it’s built for your kind to positively dominate. While many of the good moms using Pinterest aren’t clued in to the latest design looks, they are a madly appreciative crowd — if you offer up your gorgeous images, you will be met with copious applause. Anyone posting their portfolio to Behance or Core77 should double up with a little Pinterest test. After all, Pinterest users are well-educated, affluent females who likely wield serious hiring power in between Pinterest coffee breaks.

If you’re selling retail designed goods, pin your products so that site traffic flows back to your preferred retail site. That may be your Etsy storefront or a retail partner. But Pinterest users are definitely, permanently in a shopping mode — and they like buying design-driven stuff.

Question Mark via Christi Harris

In addition to yours truly, here are a few Pinterest boards and people to get you started. (Note: You can follow everything a user pins, or just follow one or several of their boards.)

Amy Nalette / Color
Amanda Pearl Brotman / Color
COLOURLovers
FastCo.Design
Sight Unseen
Design*Sponge
Sha Hwang

Happy pinning to you!

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Do you have any knockout students in your color theory classes right now?

Thomas Bosket: I haven’t taught color this past year, so here are some students from previous years: one work by Liz Marshall exhibited the Bezold effect and the economic use of color. [Ed note: the Bezold effect is an optical illusion in which two colors, juxtaposed in small doses, distort the impression of each color’s shade, just by proximity to another hue.] The other, by Stephanie Luk, offers a redesign of Parsons’ very narrow hallways.

Bezold Effect study by Liz Marshall

Colour of Space assignment for Parsons’ narrow hallways, by Stephanie Luk

Langdon Graves: I had a terrific class last fall because of how dedicated the students were. Early each semester, I assign a Creative Color Chart — a spin on the traditional color wheel — for which the students create their own progressive designs featuring 12 hues, tints and shades. One student, Christine Gurtler, designed a chart inspired by the grid of a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan:

That’s all acrylic paint and paper.  Obviously, she went beyond 12.

Two semesters ago I gave the assignment to design an infographic to represent a personal experience, using color in a significant way. A student named Vaishnavi Mahendran charted the progression of her taste in music and fashion from childhood to adulthood, assigning an increasingly darker, more sophisticated hue of pink to each phase of her life (interrupted by an amusing black/metal phase). It’s such a clever and attractive design, I love sharing it:

Detail from infographic by Vaishnavi Mahendran

Lightning-round: Whom would you rather have as a roomie on a desert island, Josef Albers or Johannes Itten? [Note: both men are Bauhaus artists noted for their contributions to “classic” color theory.]

From Homage to the Square color-interaction series, by Josef Albers

TB: Itten. He was trying to understand color and contextualize it. Albers feels too esoteric (in an uninteresting and exclusive manner — we have history, Albers and I … grad school!) and his work has been turned into “rules,” no fault of his, but I could just see hours and hours of argument about the color of the sunsets.

Horizontal Vertical, by Johannes Itten

LG: I know I should say Itten because he was such a master and without him, we certainly wouldn’t have as much to learn from Albers. But I think I would choose Albers because of how much he attributed his appreciation for color to his experiences with his students.

This is how I continue to learn about color, myself: by interacting with other people and learning as much from them as they do from me. I also like the thought of sitting around on a desert island with Albers, creating simultaneous contrast collages of found mango leaves.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

From Parsons’ Color and Culture student blog

You teach color theory, a subject some designers and artists believe is impossible to teach (i.e., brilliant colorists are born, not made). How do you deal with students who harbor this belief, but still have to take your classes?

Thomas Bosket: I have taught unteachable courses for 16 years and have never found a student to be unteachable. That is a myth based on teachers who want to feel like exclusive geniuses. “Genius” is not born; it’s in all people but it needs to be tapped. That is done by reaching into the well of creativity, finding our own unexpected reaction or response to a need of society that is yet unmet.

If you take a “creativity” course there should be no rules, only guidelines. If you are following recipes, it is not creative. If you are facing some fears you are learning at a point somewhere near your edge.

Langdon Graves: Thankfully, I don’t often encounter students with this attitude. I try to nip it in the bud on the first day of class by discussing the largely subjective nature of color, while also introducing the attempts made by theorists and artists to establish some kind of common protocol to study it more objectively.

Everyone is born a colorist, because everyone has been exposed to and has a unique reaction to color. In teaching it, I think my responsibility is to provide the tools and skills to guide that reaction.

I heard at Print’s Color Conference about an unconventional color-theory exercise you use at Parsons, in which you get students to paint the colors in their own skin. Can you tell me more about that?

TB: This started as my exercise. I was trying to teach students to respect the specific matching of color. They could have cared less about my explanation, but I knew they cared about my reason for having them respond so specifically: Color is the most emotional element and to create a refined response we need to tap into our emotions (our psychological makeup) and that is a very dream-like arena, a very personal arena. So, instead of having them match any random color I thought, “Why not have them paint a very personal color!” and that was their skin. (This assignment has led to some amazing discussions about expectations and preconceived notions. Another longer discussion!)

LG: This is Thomas’ wonderful exercise, which I also do in my classes because it’s so much fun. The students are delighted to be able to paint directly onto their skin (acrylic, non-toxic) and I love to hear them get excited about how much violet or green they’re having to add.

Because Parsons is so internationally diverse, this activity always prompts discussion of the differences in everyone’s skin color, which is fascinating to be able to break down in terms of pigment. But creating the colors also reveals how similar the formula is for nearly everyone, and how subtle and important the nuances are. I like the symbolism this holds for celebrating cultural differences while appreciating what we have in common.

Can you each cite some examples of brilliant use of color in design, and a terrible use that was nonetheless widely lauded?

TB: Widely lauded? Or widely used? Hollywood movie posters with a basically monochrome color palette (one color with a range of black and white grays) it is EVERYWHERE! More brilliant uses of color would be seen on Mike Perry’s design work, fashion by Balenciaga (particularly their Spring 2010 collection) or the designs of NandoCosta.

Excellence can come from the worst choices that are transformed, but the WORST is what is “factoried” out of most color education when the teacher pushes students to use “balanced designs, good harmonies” or any such crazy formulas you see in book after book after book on color! Teach a student to trust their responses to sensation, and you will see great color in design.

Open Everything exhibit at Maxwell Colette Gallery, 2011

Open Everything exhibit at Maxwell Colette Gallery, 2011

From NandoCosta’s Color Suspensions illustration series

LG: I think Benetton reigns as one of the best brands for color because of how completely they use it. They are colorful in every sense: products, people, advertising, philosophy. They are always bright and bold and they never go out of style.

Ikea put out a cookbook called “Homemade Is Best“ that is such a simple, visual treat and uses color to perfectly complement the natural hues of the food ingredients.

IKEA, Bondkakor, from Homemade Is Best series. Designed by Carl Kleiner

I love the wry yet delicious use of color in the work of artists/directors Lernert & Sander, particularly in their short films like Chocolate Bunny (2007).

Although she is a fine artist and not a designer, I think Jessica Stockholder is one of the most amazing contemporary colorists.

“Untitled,” Jessica Stockholder, 2006

One of the worst uses of color I can think of, which gets overlooked as a work of design, is the Homeland Security Advisory System, better known as the “terror alert” level. According to the scale, red is the most severe while green indicates low to no risk of a terrorist attack; orange yellow and blue fall between them. I appreciate the benefits of tapping into our instinctual responses to color to help us in times of crisis, but I am skeptical of the helpfulness of the system, as well as the crisis. I also wonder when we might see blue or green make their debut; the alert level has never dipped below “elevated.” A little bit of blue would go a long way.

[We continue the color conversation in a future post ...]

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

I love the idea — cut to me, bee-lining it to buy the world’s most eccentric shade — but it also got me thinking: Can you actually buy colors? Not too long ago I blogged here about International Klein Blue, a patented shade by artist and agent provocateur Yves Klein. Today’s post explores other real-world examples of companies and people trying to do just that.

A much-ballyhooed recent example: In 2010 Cadbury won a legal battle protecting their signature purple (Pantone 2685C) against infringement by Darrell Lea, a New South Wales candy manufacturer whose purple packaging on a certain sweet edged too close to Cadbury Purple for comfort.

The case illustrates a classic way one can “own” a color: trademark a particular shade in a given industry or product category, fund an IP-litigation firm handsomely, and a particular shade can indeed be exclusively yours. Just ask UPS about its brown, McDonald’s about is red-and-yellow, or Coca-Cola about its signature red.

UPS’ campaign “What Can Brown Do for You?” is a fascinating case-in-point. The tag line sparked a whole meme of imitators in unrelated industries, some actual trademark infringements (like New Jersey attorney Samuel Z. Brown’s misuse of the tag line for his website search) to plain spoofs with varying levels of tastefulness. UPS pulled the plug on the campaign after a good long run — 2002-2010 — so spoof-sensitivity may or may not have played a role in the decision to move on.

UDS T-Shirt at desi-threads.com

From Pittsburgh Steelrs wide receiver Antonio Brown’s site

Other eye-opening takes on the idea of owning a color: BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin used the Cadbury Purple flak as an opportunity to suss out more color-themed trademark controversies. She (and her commenters) unearthed some great ones, including several non-traditional patent cases like pink insulation (Owens-Corning), NBC’s “ding ding ding” sound (Reg. No. 523,616), and plumeria-scented sewing thread (Reg. No. 1,639,128).

Our good buddies at Under Consideration’s Brand New also have eagle-eyes for this sort of thing. My two faves aren’t color-related infringements per se, but still thumping-good reads: IHOP v. IHOP (Prayer v. Pancakes) and the Rat City Roller Derby vs. Starbucks.

Any stellar examples of corporate color-owning we missed?

Poster for Rip! A Remix Manifesto, a film about copyright law by Colin Dunn

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

On This Day calendar via Design You Trust

#2 is certainly a late-breaking one. Pantone announces its Color of the Year every November, priming us for winter’s darkest months with a bright shot of the color we’ll all soon be craving. This year it’s Tangerine Tango, my absolute favorite, a juicy retro shade that’s also warm and oddly intimate.

Orange thrift by karolines retro on Flickr

Speaking of Pantone, our next 3 color stories include the best in color-mad gifts. Here’s this year’s holiday gift roundup (#3). You’ll also want to shop color books every design-minded fan should own (#4), including COLOURLover’s marvelous book, “Color Inspirations.”

2011 saw the dubiously successful launch of Kindle Fire, Amazon’s color tablet (#5). It also marked the full entrenchment of Google Image Search by color (below, #6), and the relatively quick crash-and-burn of the Color mobile-video-sharing app (#7). However, a substantially revised version of the app is now out and garnering praise from many corners. Download the new Color app now.

Moving on from technology to art, I’m still sorry I missed the Color in Commerce exhibit in Seattle (#8), which took as its premise the chunky blocks of color stacked in the form of shipping containers in Seattle’s busy ports.

ColorsTIMOTHY-TELEPORTED-1314934560623 from Colors of Commerce exhibit, 2011

Imprint’s 3-part series on synesthesia (#9) – the harmless cognitive quirk that results in “seeing” colors associated with certain letters, numbers, sounds or tastes — was another big hit. You’ll also get a hilarious, quick-hit education in the subject in poet Jennifer L. Knox’s video below:

Last but not least are 2 annual color traditions I’m looking forward to repeating: Print’s first Color Conference (#10) and HOW + Print’s Color in Design Awards (#11). You just missed the deadline to submit your best color projects for this year, but why not bookmark it and make submitting your first 2012 New Year’s Resolution?

Happy New Year! by Jimmy Benson on Flickr

Here’s to a smashing start to your 2012 — with much color to come!

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.