Mark Steven Ritter and COLOURLovers in Canada's Globe and Mail.

Congrats to Mark for being featured in Canada's Globe and Mail (apparently it's like our New York Times, yanks), in an article about COLOURLovers. Mark has always offered me so much sincere encouragement and so many kind words (thanks), and he's a truly gifted artist who deserves recognition.

Here's my mashup of the article, with my own palette notes, linkage, and a smattering of external links for those curious about more....

Painter Mark Steven Ritter works in his apartment/studio in Montreal, Aigust 16, 2007. Mr. Ritter has used colourlovers.com to create more than 1,200 palettes.

COLOUR ME OBSESSED
At ColourLovers.com, those with a passion for pigment create hues, swap palettes and even fall in love

REBECCA DUBE
Globe and Mail Update
August 17, 2007 at 9:13 AM EDT

They argue the merits of teal versus aqua with a seriousness usually reserved for foreign policy debates.

They create colours with names such as "elle était belle" (a lily-pad green) and "deep tissue massage" (a brick red).



They have hundreds of names for beige.



They are the self-proclaimed colour addicts of ColourLovers.com, a social networking site for people who enjoy exploring and analyzing hues.

Consider it a Facebook for the pigment-obsessed.

Since its launch in December, 2004, the site has attracted more than 20,000 members from around the globe, inspired home redecorations and website designs, and spawned real-life friendships and even one marriage.

If you've ever stared blankly at a display of paint swatches and wondered where to start, or despaired at finding a colour to complement the pink bathroom fixtures in your apartment, ColourLovers may be able to help.

"Colour is a pretty mainstream thing; we see it every day, but it hasn't gotten as much mainstream attention," says site founder Darius Monsef, a Web developer in Portland, Ore.

He started the site after taking an uninspiring class on colour theory and deciding that he - or at least the collective creativity of the Web - could do better.

Mr. Monsef says the Colour Lovers, as they call themselves, range from professional designers who use the site to develop colour schemes for websites and advertising campaigns to hobbyists who get hooked on combining different colours into palettes and giving them funky names.

"We have a lot of members who are not in any sort of artistic field, but this is their creative outlet," Mr. Monsef says.

The site allows users to create colours and palettes, share them, rate and comment on others' creations, discuss burning questions such as "what is the most unusual colour?" in forums, and send "love notes" to other users.

Prolific contributors include a graphic designer from Louisiana, a 16-year-old girl from Miami, a New Brunswick framer and an Ohio teacher.

"It's an immediate gratification: You're making something from nothing, and I think that has a lot of appeal," Montreal artist Mark Steven Ritter says. He has used the site to create more than 1,200 palettes - combinations of five colours that are the main attraction on the site.

Two of his favourites are "science fiction," an eye-catching mix of bright lime greens and soft blues, and "Rodchenko," named after a leading constructivist artist in the period following the Russian revolution, featuring muted greens and reds. Each palette, Mr. Ritter says, "almost becomes an art object in itself."



He met up with several Colour Lovers on a recent trip to New York and regularly corresponds with others in Singapore, Peru, England and Japan. He tends to gravitate to those who share his taste in dark, saturated and high-contrast colours.

Recently, though, he has noticed an influx of younger colour lovers creating brighter palettes that he finds surprisingly intriguing.

That's part of the charm of the site, Mr. Ritter says: "You might really love something you never would have thought of doing." He often uses the site to test out colour combinations for his paintings.

Site users rate and comment on them. "If I get a very good reaction, I'll apply it to a painting," he says.

ColourLovers inspired Vania Sofiandi to switch her career from business to graphic design, which she is now pursuing as a freelancer in the Chicago area.

Ms. Sofiandi, who has created more than 1,300 palettes, says the site changed the way she sees the world. Colour Lovers don't just see red or get the blues - they see fire-engine red or feel deep-sea blue.



"My brain randomly pops up colours when I'm feeling strong emotions," she says. "Dark, muted grey when I am irritated, blue cyan for adventurous, pinkish purple for admiration and bright pink when I feel narcissistic."



The site's appeal lies in its community as much as its colours, Ms. Sofiandi says. Two of her friends who met on the site fell in love, moved in together and got married last month. Alas, no word on what their wedding colours were.

Mr. Monsef says he hopes to expand the colour trends section of the website, which currently includes analyses of magazine-cover colour schemes and the colours of the world's top first-class airlines. (Purples and wood tones are hot with this crowd.)

"We want to be able to say, 'Last month, this shade of blue was popular with this demographic,' " he says. "It started as a fun colour-inspiration site, but now we want to give more value to the members."

Already, Mr. Monsef says, running ColourLovers has expanded his palette: "I couldn't have told you what chartreuse was before doing the website."



+THE GLOBE AND MAIL ARTICLE
+CHECK THE COLOURLOVERS BLOG POST HERE.

+MARK STEVEN RITTER'S SITE
+DARIUS MONSEF'S SITE

COLOURLovers and MOO.

Now that I got ColourLovers out of the way, it's time for what I wanted to show off yesterday.

MOO is a progressive online printing service based in England. It enables users to print notecards, "minicards" and books of miniature stickers from Flickr, Second Life, or other personal designs; they also offer a selection of products from featured designers. You guessed it: one of those designers is ColourLovers.

Darius Monsef provided MOO with 120 of 2006's top Palettes, up to 50 of which appear in each assortment of cards and stickers.

If you want the whole story, take a gander at the CL blog entry HERE.
If you want to cut to the damned chase already, check out the MOO site.

And this is all cool, and I might have bought some of these anyway, but I'm buggering to blog about it because I've noticed from the snapshots that a couple of my palettes are included in the mix:

I think I spy

and

If I'm not mistaken, anyway. I don't expect CL to be buggered to divulge every one of the 120 palettes submitted to MOO, and near (far?) as I can tell without actually buying a pack, the designs you receive are random. So who knows which palettes were picked or what you'll get when you order... but I like to fall asleep at night knowing that, somewhere, someone could actually be using and enjoying the palettes I've frittered so much time building.

COLOURlovers.

I should have blogged about COLOURlovers a long time ago. Anyone who's interested in color, this is for you. If you know anything about color, particularly hexadecimal color, you're already home. If you don't know much about color, you'll pick up so much so fast. Either way, you create a little account and amass a collection of unique colors that you put a name to (here's a couple of my alltime faves)

and then build palettes out of your and everyone else's colors:


At this point, there are around 20,000 members, 340,000 colors, and 120,000 palettes registered. Users tag, give feedback about and rank colors and palettes (my current top five palettes run on the sidebar of this blog, actually), and monthly color trends in the media and on the net are monitored. Think Flickr, but with colors instead of photos. I'm a long-standing member at this point, and I've made some solid contacts there, and there's an influx of new membership and activity.

COLOURLovers is one of those rare things on the internet: it'll never cost you a dime, it's benign and all-inclusive in purpose, and the entire community is supportive, genial, and comprised of genuine people. Although it does have a proprietor, the illustrious Darius Monsef, being a Lover feels like being a shareholder and every user has a hand in shaping the site. Plus it supports the arts, which I'm a sucker for.

I could blather on and not do it justice. For some reason, it's always hard to explain. But have a gander; you might be snagged. More on CL to come.

My Colours
Colourlovers Home
Top Palettes sitewide
Current Media Trends

Random goodness

fortune

I feel really fortunate right now. Things have been pretty rocky since just before last Christmas, but it seems like patience, doing unto others, and not taking my friends for granted, as simple and square as that sounds, has done me good.

Thanks to those who just live and let live. I promise to do the same.

myspace's space.

When I was still using the MySpace layout template, I noticed while messing with my profile code that links from my profile to external sites were being corrupted as soon as I saved the code.

After inputting the URLs for the links into the page code and pressing save, the page would appear normal and the links would work, but when I returned to the source code to find the links, they had been converted into msplinks.com/ sub-urls with a long string of characters (msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vc2FpbnQ0NS44ay5jb20vbm... for example).

I tried to correct them, to no avail, and as I was irked but not really impeded, I ignored it for a while. Then I overrode the profile form layout with a blanket stylesheet, for which I had to manually input URLs for links to my images, blog, friends, "message me" etc. Links that I had mistyped were broken all over the page and I fixed them one by one... then yesterday Stephanie told me the link to my blog (this one) was broken. I pitched a miniature fit retyping every variation of the url I could think of, and every time I saved it, myspace converted it to an msplinks url. Except now, when clicked on my profile, the link would redirect to the myspace.com/ home.

I finally decided to get to the bottom of the msplinks thing, and did a little searching. It looks like msplinks.com was implemented as a sort of linking middle-man, and the sub-url string of numbers and symbols is to aid myspace.com in tracking the content of external links.

It's purported to be intended to crack down on comment spammers who link to spam sites (if the code of a commenter's link contains a domain which has been blacklisted as spam by msplinks, it encodes a redirect to myspace.com and breaks the link). But for some reason msplinks also blacklists Blogger sites (I'm not aware that spam Blogger links are exactly rampant or anything). People have invented programs which will convert a URL to an msplinks URL but without the redirect, but I guess myspace has discovered and shut those down, too...

I'm not pointing to any conspiracies, but I don't see how disrupting spammers justifies precluding people from linking to their own damned blogs. Perhaps they're concerned that their prestigious blogs.myspace.com service will lose some of its esteemed luster.

It's bullshit that we have to circumvent this at all, partly because if you're dumb enough to add a spammer as a friend, then you're pretty dumb and you deserve spam. But more to the point, it's another example of myspace censorship and proof that myspace is a chaperoned corner of the internet, which is to say that your page is not really yours. I'm still there because it networks me with people I wouldn't otherwise have contact with, but that's a diatribe for another blog, and for the time being we'll have to keep creatively cracking myspace's arbitrary limitations.

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Commentary aside, if you're trying to link to an outside URL from your myspace profile and it links back to myspace.com when you click it, do this to beat the blacklist:

1. Set up a new page at a non-blacklisted external domain (your personal dotcom, for example),
2. put nothing in it but a redirect script in the HEAD of the page: <script>self.location="http://YOURURL";</script>
3. place your destination URL in the script,
4. and link your myspace profile to the redirect page instead.
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It's a pain in the ass, but it's worth it to have it your way. Speaking of which, if you want to override your profile layout with a clean style sheet like the one on mine, I'll be pleased to hand the code off to you. Things aren't getting any less fascist on their own.