The Joys of Greyscale

Why, exactly, is this site passed through a greyscale filter? If you’d like to join, all you need to do is add this:

html {
  filter: grayscale(100%);
}

In some respects, it could seem distasteful. Even conformist. After all, the modernist trend of grey homes and floors as some proper signal is getting awfully old.

Though in the seventies and eighties saturated color drenched everything. Everything! But nowadays if you walk along highways so it’s a stream of some silver mirage with occasional red. Go through any HOA ordained community and the most muted colorschemes are guaranteed for fencing, entrances.

It is argued that saturated flowery color went out of vogue because it was exhausting. Color evokes much out of you: it’s why the important bits on any webapp jump at you through hue. To stimulate or get you hooked. Everyone young enough understands the underlying psychological manipulation of bright red notifications.

Additionally, color everywhere means color nowhere. If you stare at the same highway stream in our saturated past, all the colors blended together into a blob of nothing. Because if everything stands out, nothing does. This is why design principles center themselves around spare use of brights and making muted derivatives from your “primary”. Let that which ought to stand out, stand out, and everything around as support.

It is with the same conclusions which led to greyscale on this site. This site, and every site around. I find joy in viewing through a greyscale. As some semblance of sovereignty, some semblance of intentionality, or a delusional take from a prisoner, nevertheless it’s calming.

If you only have so much color to allocate in a day… Wouldn’t you rather see color in the world around you?