Modern design has an impossible job. Just consider the logo. It has to work as a teeny-tiny app icon and also as a giant sign on a building. It has to command attention in full color and work just as well in black and white. Most importantly, it has to appeal to the largest possible audience, across different countries and languages and contexts. But here’s the catch: every single distinctive feature, by definition, is also a feature that somebody out there is prepared to complain about. (Online, and in all caps.)
So one by one the distinctive features are lopped off, a serif here, a bold color there, the clever detail the intern stayed up all night on, until you’re left with something that no committee could possibly object to. Which is to say: beige. Beige has been on a winning streak for decades, and you can count the casualties in a parking lot.
The Extinction of Green
Parking lots aren’t exactly picturesque, but they used to be a riot of color. Thirty years ago, sedans in 100% real colors like “Tornado Red” or “Bright Tangerine” fought for space next to trucks and SUVs in “Tahitian Green Pearl” or “Midnight Purple II.” (Seriously, colors had sequels. Who gets to name car colors, and are they hiring?) In 1996, neutral colors like white, black, gray, and silver accounted for less than half of the cars in North America, according to iSeeCars, which analyzed more than 22 million cars over the last 30 years. Today, those neutral colors account for 80% of the cars on the road, while some of the vibrant color choices have faded to almost nothing.
Take a moment to mourn the casualties, and not just the garish or the ugly, but colors that people actually claim are their favorites. In 1996, red was the second most popular car color at 20%, and today, only 7% of all cars on the street are red. Green was the fourth most popular car color in 1996 when one in eight cars was green. Today, only 2% of cars are green, so that when it comes to cars, “green” is literally the color of a dinosaur.
Beige is the Color of Money
Green cars didn’t die because anyone stopped liking green. People love green. It’s the color of spring, of money, of go. Green shows up near the top of every favorite color list that anyone bothers to run. But to a car dealer, green is the color of a sedan still sitting on the lot in March. A bold color is a gamble: it means a buyer might reject it, or less money at trade-in. So the safe order is the color nobody can object to, bought by the thousands. And the factory is glad to oblige, because a thousand identical beige cars are cheaper to build than a thousand interesting ones. (Beige: not a color so much as a risk assessment.)
The irony is that expensive used to mean more: precious metals, ornamentation, flourishes that proved money had been spent. Now expensive means less. The luxury sneaker is plain white, and costs more for every logo it leaves off. The top-of-the-line phone comes in “space gray,” a gray so advanced they named it after the emptiest void we know of. Somewhere along the way, nothing became the premium option.
The Case for Character
What we’ve lost isn’t entirely about looks. It’s the distinctiveness that used to help us navigate the world. Things looked different so that we could tell them apart, from brands to buttons to buildings. Now they don’t. You check into an Airbnb that promises to make you feel at home anywhere, and find the same pale wood floors, the same woven pendant lamp, and the same trailing plant, until you wake up not knowing which city you’re in. You walk down a street of independent shops whose signs all use the same lowercase sans-serif, so a row of businesses that have nothing to do with each other reads like a single chain. Even when you reach for your own phone, you hit the wrong app for the third time because every icon looks like the same flat gradient blob. When everything merges into the same look, the world gets harder to read and harder to find your place in.
Beige blandness is what you get when committees decide that nothing is allowed to be disliked. Character is what you get when you let a thing be fully itself. Objects with character, with a specific point of view, are some of our favorite things at Curio & Co. It helps that our entire committee is the two of us, and even we don’t always agree. But we agree on this much: better a little too green than beige.
