Charting the course of the crayon industry

The number of Crayola crayon colors grows at an average rate of 2.56% annually.

Thus, "Crayola's Law": The number of colors will double every 28 years.

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! If the Law holds true, Crayola's gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there'll be 330 different crayons!

WeatherSealed Blog: Color Me a Dinosaur

(Via, Cort Sims)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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Anonymous

I totally expected Crayola to rewrite their history and not include “flesh” color in their chronology. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had not, merely adding an *. Nice to see a company that’s willing to admit it has not always been perfect.

Other than Dominoes…
MattF

How about made-to-order ink-jet + wax crayons?
frankieboy

2050 can’t come soon enough. And the color scheme for that chart really does suck.
phisrow

http://xkcd.com/605/
Halloween Jack

I can’t see anyone beyond the casual coloring-book colorer needing anything that isn’t in the big 64-crayon box (and even most of those will go untouched while the black crayon gets slowly whittled down).
- motorbikeboy
  
  How right you are Halloween Jack! 64 of anything is enough really.
  
  - Bill Gates
semiotix

Of course, just as with transistors, at some point quantum effects will take over and that’ll be that. You just can’t have a crayon absorbing half a wavelength more or less than the next one over in the box.
ophmarketing

Honestly, my kids rarely have much use for anything beyond the 8 colors from 1903. Six year olds really don’t need eleven different variations on teal.
cymk

Technically, there is no reason we don’t have crayons for each pantone color (other than the issue of producing them). Would kids really need/use 1000+ colors to choose from?

If anything I see kids buying crayons like people buy paint. You can buy a set of specific colors, or you can mix your own for roughly the same price. Maybe even an online interface where you can choose your choice of pantone colors (up to a set number per box) and they are made custom for you, then mailed out to you. So your kids could have their own custom box of crayons that would be different from their friends box of crayons.
coolvoodoo

I really miss Raw Umber……….and Teal Blue, and Blue Grey, and Magic Mint. Even Orange Red and Violet Blue had their perfect places. Good friends, all gone.
braininavat

I have to say – the color scheme chosen for that chart really sucks!
- arkizzle / Moderator
  
  “I have to say – the color scheme chosen for that chart really sucks!”
  
  Please please please, tell me that was something approximating irony..
Micah

I LOVED my box of 64 back in kindergarten. I agree that it’s hard to see why anyone needs significantly more than that, but there were colors in there like gold and silver that you couldn’t achieve simply by blending other colors, but seemed way cool to 5yo me. And there were colors that were super useful like peach (which I often used for skin tones) that would be hard for a 5yo to create by blending.
Anonymous

More relevant. http://abstrusegoose.com/221
Bonus points to calculating the year this is released using the numbers already provided.
Captcha: Emulated intelligence.
kdg

@cymk: Brilliant! I’m in!
adamnvillani

Am I the only one who remembers “raw sewage”? On a recent trip to the Hyperion Waste Treatment Plant, I was a little disappointed to find out that raw sewage doesn’t really look like feces so much as it does gray mop-water.
NomadEngineer

When do we reach the crayon singularity?
- Robert
  
  2035, we acheive human-level artificial crayonence, at which point the crayons begin improving themselves.
  
  2045, the Crayon Singularity occurs. Crayons get to upload themselves to nanotechnological compucrayonium substrate, where they get to imagine whatever color they want.
darn

Am I the only one who remembers “raw sewage”? The internets don’t seem to share this vivid, fond memory.
- Avram / Moderator
  
  Dam @16, “raw sewage” must’ve been from a box of Bernie Botts’ Every-Colour Crayons.
- Anonymous
  
  No you’re not the only one. I’m here for the very fact that I also remember the raw sewage crayola, and did a search in an attempt to try and find it. I’m thinking Crayola wants to just sweep that little gem under the rug.