What are colours? Are they the light being refracted from all the spaces around us or the one absorbed by the pigments? Are they a feeling? An emotion? A frequency? A convention?

What makes the sky blue and what makes the forest green? What is #d63e8f? What is #0000cc? Is your red also my red? Is my pink your red? Do the cone receptors in my eye send information to my brain in the same way that yours do?

The way we use colour has deep meanings and can convey a lot of hidden patterns. We use colours nowadays to deliver messages, to warn people of dangers or to guide them in emergency situations.

Red means “no” or “danger”, green means “go” but sometimes “exit”. Yellow is pretty much a warning sign, but it is more likely to be used to signal the presence of a banana. 🍌

As a web designer, I thought I was working with colours, but actually I work with emotions, behavioral patterns and conventions. In time I’ve had some favourite colours and I used a lot of these on designing projects along the way, some on a personal feeling, others because they were cool, sometimes just because the customer liked it. I used #cc0000 in addition to black and white as a strong and imposing corporate presence. I’ve painted all my cars in Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 a warm and autumn-like #ff6600, however my favourite colour is and will remain #fcc404.

It’s RGB Decimal value are 252, 196, 4, which can be represented as rgb(252,196,4). or as 0, 22, 98, 1 in the CMYK colourspace and while it does not have a Pantone® corespondent, it resembles the colours of Marigolds.

I’ve discovered this precise colour somewhere in highschool, before I started my web developing career and I was just dabbling in design and photoshopping stuff. Back in the day, I used to visit my friends over at a local radio station, where I’d get music, spend good time with them and basically falling in love with being in a radio booth and on the airwaves, something that I still kinda regret a bit not doing for living. But I digress. I was there, being a teenager, mind as a sponge in a setting that I really loved and got inspired one day while doing my personal website (which is no longer online), to go with a full-blown yellow design. Imported the radio’s logo into Photoshop, chose the colour picker, clicked on the yellow part and there it was: #fcc404. I added below the WylFM first two logos, however the one on the left was originally brighter, but the only photo of it I found is very muddy. The left one was used from 2001 to 2004, and the second one until 2009, when they had a brand overhaul.

That version of my website is long gone, the radio moved from town a long time ago as well, rebranded, and even shut down. Years have come and gone and many things changed along the way, people have skipped town, changed countries or are doing something completely different (shout out to Gabi, now a great museum guide, to Iulian and his nice garden, to Clod and his pilot licence) but one thing remained with me along all these years. Because while for some it’s just a colour, for me it’s a reminder that while live moves on, good things remain the same. It’s looking to a time when life was easy and simple through rosemarigold-tinted glasses and being conscious of the progress we made in life, without losing the origin point of it all. That’s why my default theme is using this colour as it’s highlight and accent and will be for as long as I live.

To some it’s something that will go unnoticed, for others it’s just a colour, but for me it will always be #fcc404.

PS: If you didn’t get it, the article’s title is a reference to probably the best episode in the history of TV.