Monday, August 6, 2007

Stamp of the Day: Crayons

The stamp of today is relevant for three reasons:

1. Crayola crayons are made in Easton, Pennsylvania, and we was just across the river from Easton yesterday in New Jersey's Phillipsburg (yes, riding steam trains, drinking wine, and having lunch in an old train dining car, but more about that another time). They even have a Crayola museum in Easton.

2. Look at the box. This is old-fashioned design, and out-of-style, but this style is coming back, at least here in the US. I love this old style, instead of today's boxy, kid-friendly designs (like this).

3. What happened to green? This is a box of 8 colors for a school child, and no green? Was this box supposed only to be used in the wintertime? This time of the year we are surrounded by different shades of green, and if you had this box, you really couldn't be an impressionist around here.

The box on the stamp is the first Crayola crayons ever sold and the first ever kids-crayons ever made too. This box cost a nickel (5 cents) when it was sold in 1903.

I can't remember if we had Crayola crayons in Sweden while growing up, but my kids have used up hundreds of them. Most crayons are made in China these days (not Crayolas though), but watch out, some contain lead. Not really great for little kids to chew on.

The names of the newer colors are amusing too: Outer Space, Macaroni and Cheese, Purple Mountain's Majesty, Inch Worm, Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown, Radical Red. Now, go and make some art!


O.K. said...

There is a green, next to the orange!
The colors in 1903 were black, brown, orange, purple, blue, green, red and yellow according to crayola.

But you don't always need geen to make nice pictures with crayolas.

Spiderman reviews crayolas selection of colors here.

I've made the observation that toddlers tend to be most interested
in the toys in bright, pure colors. But it might be the same for adults, ever noticed that Windows XP looks like Fisher-Price?

LS said...

The Spiderman review is hilarious!

I know green was in the original box, but on the stamp there is no real green. Or maybe it was and it looks black?

Maybe our whole society is toddlerified? Look at today's magazine colors, book covers, cereal boxes - you have the toddler colors there too.

LS said...

Windows XP: you can set your color scheme - I have the blue one on.

O.K. said...

I know, I was thinking of the default color scheme. A friend of mine calls MacOS X "My little pony"-OS... ;)

The crayon looks dark green on my screen. It used to be calibrated but the backlightning has changed a lot in color temperature since then. There's no embedded color profile in the picture either so there's no way to be sure. Correct colors on the web doesn't really work unfortunately, unless you use the safari browser on the "my litte pony"-os.

LS said...

I figured it out - the lack of green is the US Postal Service's fault. The original box had dark green text on the front, not black like here, so the whole color scheme is off on the stamp. Someone turned off the green when they designed the stamp. That explains it.

O.K. said...

Well, I wouldn't blame USPS too much. I'm looking at the picture on my other newly calibrated screen and the text and logo are dark green. Someone forgot to turn on the greens before they shipped your display...
You can't trust that what you see are the accurate colors on an uncalibrated screen or when looking at at picture without a color profile.

EH said...

Windows XP has a very similar color scheme as Fisher Price toys. And if you don´t turn all the sounds off it sounds like a toys too!

I can see the green, but only barely, it´s very dark. But then I know my big old fat (not flat!) screen is aging quickly. Soon I vill need a new one, or a portable computer. The pictures are always better on OK:s computer or on my screen at work (2 year old 19 inch flat screen).

LS said...

but, but, but!!!!

I can see the green text in the title of the post, I can see a little green frog icon on my desktop, and my 'rosling' picture that is my screen background (by O.K., of course) is also green.

O.K., can you tell us how to calibrate our screens? Maybe this is DELL's fault?

O.K. said...

As the quote goes: "You think this is simple, but just wait until I have explained it!"

The dark green is very dark. Can you see any difference between the logo and the "32" on the stamp, or are they both just as black?

"O.K., can you tell us how to calibrate our screens?"

On Windows XP without buying software and hardware to do it? No, I can't. This is an area where macs are so much easier to use than windows-based computers. I don't know how Vista handles color management but MacOs has done it fine for more than a decade.

I use a Gretag colorimeter and Basiccolor software to calibrate the macs, on the windows boxes I haven't bothered. Perhaps PP can borrow a colorimeter from work, Basiccolor's trial version can make the necessary icc-profiles that you might be able to load into your graphic card drivers. Otherwise you can always use the profiles in photoshop, which handles them fine.

LS said...

Yes, I can see a difference - the green text on the box is dark, dark green (looks black at first), and the 32 is pitchblack.

So this is the usual thing - easy on Macs and terrible to deal with on PCs. Go figure!

We have a Mac screen 5 years old at work that has a blue tint in one corner. We sent it in to be fixed on warranty by the computer guys refused to see it, so we have lived with it. It is an old G3 with MacOS 9.2 - one day when you are around I want to show it to you. We haven't been able to load a screen saver on it either, when we did the computer crashed and all our running analyses stopped.

PP said...

Funny because that box(and all later ones) were such a part of growing up I just "saw" it as green because that is what I remember. When you said it was black I had to go back and look at the pic in the post to make sure it wasn't green!