July 30, 2013

The Color of B1000D

Red is a primary color, one of three. Coloratus in Latin means “colored” but also means red. It is a primordial color, despite being commonly found in flowers.

By Glendon Mellow

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Red is a primary color, one of three. Coloratus in Latin means "colored" but also means red. It is a primordial color, despite being commonly found in flowers. The color of blood.

So it is curious that as The Animation Works tweeted yesterday, if you type in the kid-with-a-calculator style spelling of "b1000d" with the extra zero for the hexcode format, you get a bright red color.

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Yet my searching for this origin has turned up fruitless. My Google-fu has failed me. In a system where #000000 is black and #ffffff is white, is #b1000d just a coincidence? With all the possible combinations of 6 letters and numbers that could look like words, is it just a statistical probability one of them would describe a color? Wouldn't a blood-color be slightly darker?

It doesn't add up. Here's a partial list on WikiHow, and very few of them have a corresponding color. This feels built in to the system.

Note: throughout this post it was incredibly hard for me to remain consistent on the American spelling "color". Uuuugh.

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