I don't subscribe overly much to trends, or "memes", or cutesy jargon. It doesn't help me or my audience to be too specific about a subject that's relatively easy for anyone to understand, or at least "easy" as it's viewed by the most literate people on Planet Earth. Sometimes I get caught in whirlpools of astonishment and bewilderment watching t.v. (which occasionally deepens into embarrassment and/or anger for all of you uneducated messes, living out there in "T.V. Land") that reflect my advanced education and prolonged work experience in such a profound way, I simply can't entertain the discussion as relevant or useful, and that's when I know you've been sold a bunch of total fucking bullshit.
Last summer, a dressmaker decided to time the sale of their knockoff dresses for prom season to the award show red carpets and your unfortunate color blindness, which, to an expert visual communicator like me, is a really fucking nasty thing to do. As soon as I saw the image pictured above, I immediately said "blue and black" and I knew I was right. I cannot be (and could not have been, in chronological order) an artist, designer, art director, or publisher without my great eyes, and failing that, entire sectors of my industry are devoted to achieving correct color matching results. Most desktops use RGB color mode for the Internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model) and CMYK for print (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model), reflecting the pixels and paint used in the two processes.
If you blow up an image in digital imaging software, you can see the blocks of color that comprise a digital color photograph.You can then select an eyedropper tool in Photoshop (really $$$ high-end professional-grade software) to break down the color values into separate divisions of red, green, or blue (for the Internet), or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (or "K" in printing). We also have color chip manufacturers that produce tear-off swatches that we attach to layouts, in case we feel further color clarifications are needed.
Color separations are an art of their own, woefully ignorant as the public is to such practices. CMYK color values are available for any color we see as humans, rendered into palette chips that we detach from very expensive color books, for the purposes of paint mixing at the color separators. For really tough material that needs extreme accuracy (like museum-quality reproductions of famous artwork well-known for their colors), we build even more steps into the proofing process. But, that's print. In the digital world, you are much more vulnerable to suggestion and the crudeness of a programs' blocks of computer coding used to simulate color onscreen, which is much less sophisticated than the human eye, and that's the trap you all fell into.
After launching a dress campaign timed to the ball gown season of the pop culture world, the maker(s) generated a few more images to create a fake online debate that would drive up the sales of their dresses by driving traffic to their site, which is something that's actionable in my world of better ethics, but that's show business for you. Not exactly known for its morality, if you get my drift, and I know that you do. After a series of gradually lighter jpegs were posted online, the color blind people of the world went nuts, which is one of the meanest things I've ever seen in manufacturing. It points to the desperation of dressmakers and show biz people in this new economy, as a digital marketplace where the truth will "out" you in a few nanoseconds after publication.
For me, any jpeg online (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG) is simply a digital image that I can potentially pull into imaging software to color match, which not one single person or entertainment news reporter that contributed to this phony scan did. Not one. Not one of you "outed" it as a scam, so that you could all enjoy the benefits of increased traffic to your show or site, which makes you complicit in the extreme, so I'm telling you this right now: if you see anything besides a blue dress with black lace trim, get your eyes checked. You are severely vision-impaired or color blind. And you're welcome, by the way. Also, welcome to wide world of desktop publishing as the new international language for the visual arts, plebes. It's "old school": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone.
Your homework for today, lemmings:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_printing
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_printing
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness
- http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Color_Matching_System
- http://pantone.wikia.com/wiki/Pantone_Wiki
I fear for you...somewhat.
