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I finally got why my shop logo looked muddy, all because of a 1962 paint chip book
Last month I was cleaning out my grandpa's basement in Akron and found this old paint sample book from 1962, the kind hardware stores gave out free. I flipped to a page with a mustard yellow and a rust red sitting right next to each other and it hit me, that's almost exactly the colors I picked for my shop logo 3 years ago, except mine never looked that good. Turns out I had been using the bright web versions of both colors, so they fought each other instead of doing that old faded thing. I switched my palette to the dusty tones from the chip book and printed a test sign, way easier on the eyes. Anyone got a trick for finding old muted color combos like that without hunting down antique books?
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shah.evan17d ago
Man, I gotta push back on one thing here because it kept bugging me reading your post. The colors in those old chip books are not actually muted in the way you're picturing, they're just printed with pigment inks on paper instead of light being beamed at your face like a screen, and paper soaks up some of the punch. If you take that same 1962 chip and scan it, the numbers come out way brighter than what your eye sees on the paper. So when you switched your palette and it looked better, part of that was the fade feel, sure, but a big part was just that you matched the on paper look instead of the web version, which is a different thing. The web hex codes for vintage colors got picked by somebody sampling a scan or a photo, and scans always come out hotter than the real chip. What I'd do is pull any old color combo you like into a design tool and then knock the brightness down yourself, drop the saturation maybe 20 percent, nudge the hue a touch warm, until it looks like it's sitting on cardboard. You can get 90 percent of that dusty vintage thing without ever touching an antique book.
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