sundance

A visual history of Crayola colors

In 1903 Crayola crayons existed in only 8 hues. Today they number in 120. Through the years some colors have been deleted, but mostly they’ grown, branching out from the original colors. A friend of Weather Sealed recently created the image above. It is a visual representation of Crayola’s color growth. As the world’s gotten more complex so have its colors. And here is how they did it: “To create the chart, Velo gently scraped Wikipedia’s list of Crayola colors, corrected a few hues, and added the standard 16-count School Crayon box available in 1935. Except for the dayglow-ski-jacket-inspired burst of neon magentas at the end of the ’80s, the official color set has remained remarkably faithful to its roots! Ever industrious, Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56% annually.  For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law.”

Crayola’s Law thus states “The number of colors doubles every 28 years!” We’re gonna need a bigger box soon.