Never Tweet and Drive

Never Tweet and Drive
Nahito tumhari RT nahi, arthi niklegi!

Show me the Red!

I was going on the road and just put my eye balls on the vodafone showroom. I found most of the things red there. I turned my head to the opposite direction and found banners of Airtel and Vodafone. Too much red color on both the banners. Again I noticed many things in red. Red colored bikes, cars, anything red was catching my eyes. Then I started assuming that most of the brands use red color for their brand. Vodafone, Airtel, Virgin (all products), Kingfisher (all products), Royal Challengers - Bangalore (IPL cricket team owned by Vijay Mallya, whose favorite color is red and he owns Kingfisher), The Mobile Store, Good Knight (mosquitoes are biting right now), Mortein, India Post, Metro Shoes and many more. Railway signals, traffic signals, Police van/car/jeep light, Minister and VIP car light all these are also red too. South Indian actor and model Tamanna, she looks gorgeous in red.

So why so much red there? Well it's science. Color red has a very high wavelength and low frequency as compared to other colors. That makes it easy to view and it attracts easily. Red is an erotic color too. That's one reason, in Indian marriage rituals, the bride wears red color dress, and both the bride and groom wear red color liquids (don't know how to explain that) on their feet.

But when I browse through the web, I don't see the red color more. The most attractive and most used colors on the web are (except black and gray) blue, green and orange. But red color has an important participation while showing delete button/link, error message or any thing danger. And as red color attracts our eye balls, we can use red color for any banner or important section of the web page to get the attention of the user.

We learned something from IPL, now it's time to learn form T20 World Cup, actually from Star Cricket's production for the matches. Normally the score card and score bar remains blue with a tint of green, but when there is a free hit after a no ball, the score bar turns to red and keep flashing with red and blue colors alternatively. That's one way they choose to attract our eye to that area over the TV screen.

Then why blue is used more on media and web? Even the windows default desktop background color is blue, default windows XP wallpaper is too blue. Orkut, Facebook all these are blue. Then why blue? My answer is blue is cool for eyes. It puts less strain to our eyes. Don't you like blue sky, blue ocean etc.? Even swimming pools are too blue.

Anyways, whether it's blue or red, both have some importance in product/web/brand designing. It depends where and when to use which color. Everything is as per our requirement, but red picks the attention easily, so use it intelligently. So what is your favorite color? (My favorite colors are pink and purple, not red or blue.) And which color will you pick for a design project? (You don't need to be a designer to answer this, please share your thoughts on it.)

One Night Stand and iPhone

At one night, Deb told me that a company got awesome money from a simple (but beautiful) iPhone application. He said in Oriya: "khali gote night stand", which I interpreted as "only one night stand". I got surprised that moment (however that moment last for a moment :P ). How one company can earn so much money form one night stand? Later I saw the image of the application on it's website and understood that what I interpreted was wrong! The application name is Night Stand and he was telling that it's a Night Stand which earned so much money from them. Look at the photo of iPhone below on which Night Stand was running. What will be the experience of One Night Stand while Night Stand runs on your iPhone? :P