Let’s start at the beginning. Like every good boy my favourite colour growing up was blue. It was basically a default choice since I knew approximately jack all about colours, other than blue was for boys and pink was for girls, who were gross.
Blue remained my favourite colour through elementary school. There was a phase or two when green (or even red) had the top slot, but I was forcing it mostly. By middle and high school you tend not to think about favourite colours, there are more pressing matters at hand. As I approached the end of high school art and design became more important and all of a sudden colours mattered again. I didn’t want to admit to having a favourite, since I wasn’t lame or anything (it was still blue).
College and design classes forced me to explore new and exciting colours. Corporations had been destroying the colour blue for many years at this point because of its conservative and never-in-your-face-im-your-friend feel. Facebook (and later Twitter, LinkedIn, blah, blah, etc) had recently burst on to the scene and put another nail into blue’s coffin for me. It was exciting to try and find a new favourite colour.
It wasn’t long before yellow caught my attention. It was light, bright, it was the colour of a smile. I didn’t want to commit to anything too soon so I courted red, green, black and spent a lot of time with sea foam. I still think about sea foam from time to time. At some point I forgot about yellow. I got caught up with blacks and whites. If you’ve been designing websites for a while (read: flash) you’ll remember that black, white and gray was The. Coolest. Ever.
After ABSOLUTELY KILLING IT! with black, white and gray for a while I was ready for a little more colour. Yellow, more specifically #FFD24F, fit into my style quite nicely. It’s not a simple colour, a lot can go wrong if you’re not careful. That’s partly what makes yellow (#FFD24F) awesome, any fool can use blue, but yellow? Yellow is for the big ballers.
It can bite you in the ass sometimes. If you’re not careful when creating a printed piece, for example, things can go south fast (i.e. it looks like washed out crap). But yellow is also generous, transforming the bland into the exciting, the sad into the happy. So, I just want to say thank you, yellow, for being my #1. I mean, my #FFD24F.
