The color blind crayola maker

sinjin · August 13, 2012, 2:51pm

So I just read top crayon maker for the past 37 years is color blind. The first thing that popped into my head was this imaginary conversation occurring for 37 years:

Crayon minion: How do you like this new color Emerson?

Emerson: Looks grey to me!

Crayon minion who mishears grey as great: Great! We’ll put it into production immediately!

Munch · August 13, 2012, 2:59pm

That is not what color blindness is.

CalMeacham · August 13, 2012, 3:03pm

The directors of two different 3D movies were one-eyed (including the guy who did House of Wax).

Among the scenes featured in the film that make the best use of 3-D are a museum fire, a paddleball man, and can-can girls. Ironically, the director de Toth was blind in one eye, and unable to experience stereo vision or the 3-D effects. “It’s one of the great Hollywood stories,” Price recalled. “When they wanted a director for [a 3-D] film, they hired a man who couldn’t see 3-D at all! Andre de Toth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He’d go to the rushes and say, ‘Why is everybody so excited about this?’ It didn’t mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened—there weren’t a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody.”[2]

I am sometimes amazed at the career choices some people have made, or have thrust upon them.

TriPolar · August 13, 2012, 3:10pm

Possibly a crayon maker who was color blind wasn’t distracted by his personal preferences and relied more on intruments to determine color consistency and marketing results for preference. Once upon a time there were dye-masters whose talent for recognizing and comparing colors was the only way to maintain consistency in manufacturing. But 37 years ago colorimeters had supplanted this technique and produced greater consistency. The article also doesn’t specify his particular job. He could have been an engineer who specialized in wax molding processes unrelated to color.

But it is one of those interesting trivial tidbits of info.

Enderw24 · August 13, 2012, 4:41pm

Cool story. I wonder if Beethoven’s heard it.

thelurkinghorror · August 13, 2012, 8:23pm

The 8% figure usually includes anomalous trichromats, who often don’t even notice they are colorblind because their brain is able to compensate for almost everything, and only notice in limited situations.

GuanoLad · August 14, 2012, 4:57am

I’m red-green colour blind, and yet have artistic pursuits. The first time I noticed my colour blindness becoming an issue was when doing Art at High School, and I couldn’t get flesh tones right, mine were coming through too pink, but to me they looked like a close match to real life. Turns out there’s a small amount of green tone to skin that tempers it from extreme pinkness (and possibly where the “green” look when you’re ill stems from).

It still interferes with my art; I struggle with getting accurate and pleasing shades of red, brown, and green tones. I don’t think I could ever be a good film colour grader even when using a vectorscope.

Nava · August 14, 2012, 7:49am

Argentinian artist Ciruelo Cabral is green-red colorblind: he keeps his pencils (or other paints, but he mostly uses pencil, or did when I met him a long time ago) in exact order, and his wife helps him when he has problems telling two apart.

I think it’s one of the reasons why his drawings look as gorgeous in full color as in greyscale: he focuses mainly on the shape of things, so if you take the color off it still looks great.