Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Artist & Designer Edith Young Talks About Her New Book on Color
704 Plays2 years ago
Edith Young is an artist, designer, and writer from New York. Princeton Architectural Press published her first book, Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture Through Color Palettes, in 2021.
This is the final podcast episode of 2022! I hope you have a wonderful, safe, and healthy holiday season. I look forward to good things coming in 2023!
Episode Notes
Edith’s work: www.edith.nyc
Edith’s palette prints: www.edithyoung.com
Book: Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture Through Color Palettes
PolicyViz blog post on color
Related Episodes
Episode #203: Alli Torban
Episode #226: Abby Covert
iTunesSpotifyStitcherTuneInGoogle PodcastsPolicyViz NewsletterYouTube
Sponsor
Partnerhero: to waive set up fees, go to http://partnerhero.com/policyviz and mention “PolicyViz” during onboarding!
New Ways to Support the Show!
With more than 200 guests and eight seasons of episodes, the PolicyViz Podcast is one of the longest-running data visualization podcasts around. You can support the show by downloading and listening, following the work of my guests,
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Highlight
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the policy of his podcast is brought to you by partner hero partner hero provides customer service outsourcing that's built for the needs of small businesses and high growth startups so if you ever needed help with your data visualization work the way i do sometimes i need someone to help me
00:00:18
Speaker
scrape some data, or make a graph, or edit a blog post, I use Partner Hero. They have flexible terms, they can help you scale quickly, there's quality assurance baked into every product and every program, and they have offices around the world which can also help you with different languages and different nuance in your writing or your visualizations.
00:00:37
Speaker
So if you're ready to bring an outside customer support to help your startup that feels like it's part of your existing team, check out Partner Hero. Head on over to partnerhero.com slash policyvis to book a free consultation with their solutions team. Mention you heard about Partner Hero from policyvis and they'll waive the setup fee.
Introduction of Guest Edith Young
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Mizz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabish, on this week's episode of the show, which is the final show of 2022. I'm very happy to chat with Edith Young. Edith has written this really fun book called Color Scheme and Irreverent History.
00:01:27
Speaker
of art and pop culture in color palettes. We talk all about her background, all about her work, all about her excitement about color in art and in paintings. And then we also talk about how she actually got all of the more than 500 colors out of the different paintings and into this book. It's a really fun book. I mean, I'm not
00:01:47
Speaker
an art history person like I don't have any training or really any knowledge about art history as I admit to her straight up in the conversation that you're about to hear but I really did enjoy this book and it was really fun to go through all the color palettes and go through all the color shades and if you're really interested in learning more about those color shades by the way I'm going to have a separate blog post on policyvis.com
00:02:09
Speaker
that will give you the CMYK RGB and hex codes for all of the more than 500 colors in the book. So if you have the book and you like the colors and you want to use them in your work, I've got them all sitting for you.
00:02:23
Speaker
uh, elsewhere on the policy of his site so you can go in and grab them. So as I mentioned, this is the last episode of the show for 2022. I hope you have enjoyed all the various guests and conversations along with the show. I am so grateful that you spend every other week with me listening to folks working in the fields of data and data visualization.
00:02:45
Speaker
and design, different authors, different designers, folks doing amazing work in and around the field of data visualization. And so I hope you'll enjoy this last episode of the show for this year. I'll be back in January with a whole bunch of new great guests. So here we go. Last episode
Nighttime Recording and Background Discussion
00:03:03
Speaker
of the year. Here's my conversation with Edith Young. Hi, Edith. Good evening. How are you? A nighttime podcast interview. Hello. Yes.
00:03:13
Speaker
I don't do these very often. It's like, you know, it's like post daylight savings. And so it's like dark outside. I know. It's a little terrifying. It's really not that late, but it feels like a nighttime episode policy of his podcast after dark. Definitely a different different kind of show. So I'm excited to chat with you about your now. Do you still call it a new book? It's now a year old. Yeah. Year old. So I don't know what that.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah. Toddler. Right. That's the toddler, right. Really interesting book, especially I think folks who are into art history are going to get a ton out of it, which is not me. But I got a lot out of it and really enjoyed it. But I'm not an art history buff. So I think those who are like artists are going to get a ton out of it. So I want to ask you a few questions about the book in the background. And then I want to ask you a couple of technical questions about itself.
00:04:11
Speaker
Maybe we could just start simply and just talk a little bit about your background and what led you to write this kind of
Inspiration and Development of 'Color Scheme'
00:04:17
Speaker
book. Of course. Thank you so much for having me. And I do not have a classic data visualization background, whatever that may look like. I work in art and design and I went to art school, which is important because that's where this idea germinated.
00:04:35
Speaker
Um, and so basically the sort of origin story for the book is that while I was at art school, um, you know, we would have these long studio classes and these critiques. And so my friend and I would go to the local movie theater to blow off some steam. And, um, we saw one day, this documentary, um, I think it was from 2011 on Dion of Reeland, who was an editor for a long time at Harper's Bazaar and Ed Vogue.
00:05:03
Speaker
And she had sort of a grandiose larger than life personality and said all of these very quotable things, mostly about aesthetics. And so in the movie, they quote this excerpt from her autobiography where I'm going to read it. She says, I wouldn't dare misquote her. She says, all my life I've pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It's exactly as if I'd said,
00:05:32
Speaker
I want Rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple. They have no idea what I'm talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child's cap in any Renaissance portrait. And I thought that was very compelling. And I was sort of sitting in the dark theater thinking about how it was both like incredibly inexact and sort of ludicrous sounding and also kind of charming and true and how those two things could be possible at once.
00:06:01
Speaker
So then I was just sort of thinking about how you could sort of debunk and reinforce that idea at the same time in a color palette that draws from all of these paintings from the era that he's talking about, all these Renaissance portraits, and thinking about how, you know, designed out like a color chart from Benjamin Moore, Pharaoh and Ball.
00:06:22
Speaker
And so I wrote that idea on my phone during the movie and then put it away.
Target Audience and Appeal of the Book
00:06:27
Speaker
And then years later into my school experience, I made this print of the Reds of the Red Caps in Renaissance portraits. And I stayed up late collecting all these paintings from that era and trying to be very organized and then selecting these colors and putting them in this gridded array.
00:06:50
Speaker
So that was the beginning of the project. What drew you to that quote? Was it this idea of trying to obtain this perfect color? Or was it the fact that there is no such thing? What drew you to it?
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I mean, in the print that I made, there are 20 examples of these caps that she's talking about. And so that, I mean, from that example alone, you know, there, it's not what she's saying is not possible. It's there's no such perfect red, but at the same time,
00:07:23
Speaker
If you have a little bit of familiarity with the concept she's talking about, you can get a general sense of what you mean. I think it was the duality of those ideas and holding them both in your mind at the same time. Like I said, I'm not an art history buff, although as I was telling you before we started, my mom is, and my mom is loving the book because it's just
00:07:50
Speaker
describe it like the book you kind of have this like whimsical combination of like these historical artwork and then let's pull out this color this color from each of these paintings and I'm wondering when you think about your reader what do you hope that they get out of
00:08:09
Speaker
So I think it's a book that can work both for people who are kind of art history buffs and people who feel pretty intimidated by it. I think my inspiration at the beginning was someone like my brother who is very smart and didn't have like a you know sort of the knowledge that I have about this subject and thinking like how can I
00:08:33
Speaker
make it so that he would, you know, be very intrigued by it and find a very accessible entry point to jump in. So I think the palettes, you know, the palettes each have their own page and can be enjoyed on their own, as this isn't very humble, but as their own piece of art, I think. But ideally also,
00:08:57
Speaker
you know, it'll, it might trigger or pique the curiosity of someone who says, Oh, I don't, you know, I don't really know what this is talking about. I don't know why, you know, she's talking about this painter Wayne Tebow and why are there the greens of the garnishes, you know, throughout this page. And so then you look up his work and that sort of puts you on a little bit of a
00:09:19
Speaker
a goose chase to figure out how this theme has emerged in his work.
Color Extraction Process
00:09:23
Speaker
And so I just like the idea. And I think color, you know, there's so much levity to color in most cases. And so it feels like a really nice way to segue into this subject matter.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because the way I hear you describe it is if you were to teach a class, an art history class, that it sounds like the way you would bring people into that is through color and not necessarily through form or curvature or the different types of painting that seems like color is just so accessible for people.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yes. I mean, I think, you know, a good teacher would teach you all of those things, but I think that that is the angle that I've found that I haven't seen that existed elsewhere. Yeah. So how did you pick the spreads in the book? Because there's, I don't know, what, about 20 or 30 different spreads. So how did you go through and pick those?
00:10:22
Speaker
I think there may be 40 pallets in total. And they're very subjective. I mean, I would say that I think the whole project is fairly subjective. And I think that's a bit of an interesting tension to me, especially when it comes to data visualization, which I can get into a little bit in a bit. But I think that it started off, they're really led by the titles of the work. So once you're starting with Reds of the Red
00:10:51
Speaker
red caps Renaissance portraits. It's a bit of a mouthful, but I think there is something a little bit, you know, a little irreverent and humorous about it. And I liked the idea of trying to find these other things that are a little bit like punch lines or zingers when you see the palette itself. So, so basically, I mean, this definitely started as a conceptual art project. And it was the system where I created these rules and then I
00:11:17
Speaker
had to find things that applied within my system of rules and so you know sometimes that was like if I were at a museum and I saw a piece and it sort of gave me this idea I wonder if there are more paintings like this where they I wonder what the wings of the angel and all the other enunciation paintings look like or something like that and sometimes it was you know a little bit more obvious to me
00:11:44
Speaker
what someone might think was a little bit funny about an artist's body of work. But yeah, definitely, I mean, I would say definitely through a somewhat personal lens of art that I like or art that amused me. Okay, so let's talk about the practical piece because this is the question. My mom's gonna listen to this episode and she's gonna, she's gonna give me a hard time about keep referencing her, but this is the question my mom asked and it's a question I had written down so I can't give her full credit, but
00:12:11
Speaker
How did you build it? Because getting those exact colors out of a painting in real life into digital print or into print, it's got to be not easy.
Artistic Engagement and Discoveries
00:12:21
Speaker
Yes. And it isn't. I would say I consider the process of this work much more about the idea in the research than ultimately the technical aspect, which I think is fairly simple if you admit to yourself that it would be somewhat impossible to get
00:12:39
Speaker
you know, the perfect hex code of whatever Botticelli was painting with at the time. I'm, you know, hex codes were not even a glimmer in his eye. When I'm working on one that has to do with art history, I try to work with these images that are from the museum and are as white balanced as possible and are, you know, directly from their art archive where
00:13:02
Speaker
they've been photographed with a gigantic Hasselblad camera and so that's about as far as I can get with accuracy and then from there I would say I'm mostly I'm like in an adobe program and there's an eyedropper tool and I'm using that and going in and you know once you zoom in too far there are so many reds in this one cap but I am looking for a red that feels the most representative like it it feels like it would be
00:13:31
Speaker
sort of the average if you would average all these colors together and also you know if you walked away from the painting what you would think kind of resembles what you saw if it were just in your mind's eye yeah oh interesting okay so so it's so practically it's the eyedropper tool that everybody has in their regular powerpoint tool or whatever
00:13:52
Speaker
But then this last part is interesting. So when you do that and you find the color, did you kind of zoom all the way out and sort of have the painting on one side of your screen and the red that you chose on the other side of the screen is sort of like getting that feeling? Yes. I mean, definitely sometimes it takes a few tries because I don't feel like I've accurately picked the right one. But yes, I'm looking at them both at the same time.
Favorite Elements and Data Visualization
00:14:18
Speaker
And did you feel in that process that you engage with the art and the artist in a different way than when you're just looking at it on the wall? Because you're diving in. You're like the Ferris Bueller movie in real life. Yeah.
00:14:36
Speaker
I mean, I think I do. I don't know. I'm not sure that I have like a, you know, a spiritual moment with the colors when I'm in the working with them digitally. But I think often like the surprises that I find are more so, especially when I'm proved wrong by an idea. So there was this one print that I referenced before that I
00:14:59
Speaker
I worked on after the book came out but it's The Wings of the Annunciation and that's a biblical scene that has been depicted in art history many times and is one of my favorites as someone who learned a lot about religion through art history. But I would say I had this idea where you know I would pluck the colors from the wings and then I sort of said while I was making the book
00:15:24
Speaker
It was on my list of ideas. And I said, well, it's going to be all white. I'm not sure that's the most compelling palette. I'll move on to the next thing. And then I went to the Cloisters last spring. And I saw an altarpiece where they had Gabriel the angel in his wings. And it was a totally different color than I would have imagined. And so then I went back to that idea and saw they're like, they're kind of these like groovy colors that everyone uses in that era because they're just, you know, it's what they envision to be
00:15:54
Speaker
happening in that moment and they can't draw from a photograph or something like that. So they were like incredibly modern colors that they were using. And so I think in those instances, I'm especially excited when it feels a little bit like a discovery made through the typology. Right. Right. That's really interesting. You've talked about a few that you really like, but is there a favorite thread or a favorite painting or artist that you have?
00:16:24
Speaker
Um, well, one, one thing I think we haven't really talked about is there are a few, there's a kind of pop culture section at the end, which is both visual culture. And I would say there's a real emphasis on sports. And so one of my favorites is the spread of, um, Dennis Rodman's hair dye over the course of his NBA career. I just, I mean, it's like, it's the only one that's two pages that there's, there's so much to draw from. Um,
00:16:51
Speaker
And, I mean, I just thought that was so fun. But in terms of artists, I mean, it's hard to narrow one down, but one that I love especially is named Alex Katz. He is a painter who actually his retrospective just opened at the Guggenheim. I haven't seen it yet. And there's a little bit of a nod to him in one of the palettes.
00:17:14
Speaker
which is of seascapes from the 20th century. And I would say that's one where I played around the most with sort of the visualization format, where most of the palettes throughout the book are in this like square or rectangular composition in a grid. And in this one, there are these rectangles of the colors, and they're organized. Basically, they're all on the same horizon line.
00:17:40
Speaker
but they're in a different place depending on where the seascapes horizon is in that painting. So that's my little homage to him because I couldn't really figure out how to fit him in. Otherwise, he's one of those paintings. Right. But it's also interesting to link it back, as you were talking about earlier, back to date of is because you're taking, you're kind of taking color and matching it to a visual, you know, you're using the color to actually create a visualization out of these various paintings.
00:18:08
Speaker
When you think about color and you think about people making charts and graphs and diagrams, do you look at color in a particular way when you see people using a shade of blue in that graph in the Washington Post and you're like, ah, that's not the right shade of blue?
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, sometimes, certainly with many things in the world, you think this could be more aesthetically pleasing. But I also think, you know, that they're trying to get an idea across in a way that is pretty clear. The thing that interests me about the way that these palettes do relate to databiz
00:18:44
Speaker
is that the format makes it look, and I write about this a little bit in the book, but the format of a palette is sort of a very persuasive image. It looks very factual. I think it's a fairly convincing visual, and I think that tension is interesting with this subject matter that is actually fairly subjective and very perception-based. But I think it does make an argument for
00:19:11
Speaker
you know, how database can be such a strong kind of way of getting ideas across and possibly a little bit persuasive, whether or not what it's telling is true. Yeah. So when do you thought about organizing them aside from the seascape one, when you thought about organizing them, did you play with other layouts for some of the other paintings or was it just pretty natural? I'm going to do this as a grid because I've got X number of paintings and it kind of makes sense to do it that way.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think because they were mostly referencing the color charts, I think, the paint charts that you would get at the hardware store, I kept them fairly in line with that. I've played around with it a little bit since then, but I think they still, they're not far off from what you would pick up from your paint store. I mean, it's definitely, the whole project has made me very curious about other ways of working with database. So there's definitely a lot of potential.
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Book's Impact and Conclusion
00:20:09
Speaker
So when you envision your core reader and they're sitting down with this spread and they've got the paintings on the one side and they've got the boxes of the colors on the other side, how are you hoping that they're interact with that spread?
00:20:25
Speaker
I mean, I think, you know, ideally, everyone wants someone to look at their work for more than two seconds, but that's not always what happens. I do. I think it kind of depends on the type of reader, but I do
00:20:43
Speaker
I do like the idea of it as a gateway, you know, of that I don't want to create a reading experience where you're constantly going back and forth between your iPad and looking at, you know, looking all these things up. But I think that I think, you know, kind of making a list of these things that interested you and then looking them up later and kind of delving deeper into, you know, those artists and those artworks is definitely
00:21:08
Speaker
Would be a win for me like if it just made someone engage more with this thing that felt unfamiliar with them before So, okay, so before we before we wrap up so You mentioned your favorite spread is the the seascapes But is cats your favorite artist in the book or do you have a favorite artist in there as well?
00:21:31
Speaker
I mean, I would say I would say cats is my favorite artist and that the seascapes is not my favorite palette. But yeah, I mean, I love a lot of the artists in the book.
00:21:46
Speaker
but there, I mean, a few that, I don't know, Fernando Botero is one that has a really kind of like punchy tropical palette in the book. And he is known for, he's a Colombian artist painter who's known for painting people and objects in really exaggerated forms. It's pretty recognizable. There's a very popular meme of his work. And so definitely I would say for the most part, like they're,
00:22:12
Speaker
The palettes all revolve around artists who I really like for one reason or another. Yeah. I was kind of hoping you were going to say Dennis Rodman is your favorite artist because that, you know. He's up there for sure. He's up there. Yeah, it's going to be great. This is very cool. Edith, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed the book. It was just a really nice read. Just enjoy all these colors and thanks so much for taking some time out on an evening to chat with me. Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
00:22:46
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope you'll check out Ian's book. I hope you'll check out the other blog posts that I wrote where you can go get all those color palettes. If you would like to help support the show, you've got a little time now, maybe you've got a break in these last couple of weeks of the year. If you'd like to support the show,
00:23:06
Speaker
head over to your favorite podcast provider, put in a review, put in a rating. If you'd like to support the show financially, head over to Patreon or a window, or you can even go to PayPal for a one-time donation to the show that helps me cover the editing and the transcription and all the good stuff that I need to bring this show to you every other week.
00:23:29
Speaker
So again, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great holiday season. Have a great new year. And until next time in 2023, this is the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:23:45
Speaker
A whole team helps bring you the Policy Vis podcast. Intro and outro music is provided by the NRIs, a band based here in Northern Virginia. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez, and each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:08
Speaker
The PolicyViz podcast is ad-free and supported by listeners, but if you would like to help support the show financially, please visit our Winnow app, PayPal page, or Patreon page, all linked and available at policyviz.com.