that yellow
A BUTCHER'S #82
A BUTCHER’S hook/look (Cockney rhyming slang)
yelling it
A summer breather while away - and a quick dip into yellow. I can’t resist leading with this photo from a car show upstate (it probably started out as a ‘32 Ford coupe) and it is yellow.
hard working yellow
Following up on the Vermeer yellow road slicing machine from the classics (issue #80) I was thinking about all things yellow, but vehicles really over the pigment, (that’ll be in a future issue) - school buses, taxis (in New York) and all that heavy machinery, dump trucks, fork lifts etc made by the likes of CAT, JCB and Vermeer.
Why yellow? It’s really to do with visibility and therefore safety, but there’s some science in there as well: “Humans are trichromatic, meaning our eyes have three types of photo receptor cells (red, blue, & green), as well as a wavelength, school bus yellow is at its peak where two of our three photo receptors (red and green) are equally stimulated - so it essentially sends double the transmissions to the brain.” Twice as good, twice as yellow,
branding
And of course a lot has to do with brand recognition - the only thing is, it appears the different brands are all using virtually the same color to identify themselves. It’s not a lemon yellow but more similar to the school bus which was selected from 50 swatch shades of yellow and named National School Bus Glossy Yellow in 1957.
JCB obviously had a crisis of identity and felt that they had to update their yellow. It does make you wonder how many meetings it took to decide on this.
And I think we all thought there was just one big pot of ‘tractor yellow’ paint.
those pages
Local Yellow Pages were always good to flip through - they were a vital part of life. So it was curious to find out that the Yellow Pages business directory came about almost by accident, when in 1883 a printer in Cheyenne, Wyoming ran out of white paper and finished the job he was on by using yellow paper. People liked the way the resulting directories stood out from the others and three years later Reuben H. Donnelley started printing the first official Yellow Pages - to become the norm throughout the world. Simple as that.
Let your fingers do the walking.
The physical directories might have gone the way of the encyclopedia (and I doubt more recent generations would even have reason to know what they were), the term ‘yellow pages’ is one of the most-searched online and generates billions in advertising revenue each year.
cab sandwich
no school today
taxi bookend
you can’t think of cabs in New York without thinking yellow - and sometimes they gather where there’s a good cheap Indian take out round the corner.
2 guys sing 'yeah yeah' call themselves Yellow. Old cab - Aureolin my favorite yellow paint, fugitive, poison. "At rest" is a Cab Universe.Ford coupe ablaze engine only? At the campsite is that a square bed attached to the tree trunk? Foreshorten telephone repair man, oh the years of draftsmen toiling. (Am I founding?) [I wanted to share. How? can't make out. dufus admirer