By Enzo Chiarullo
At the beginning of the last century, research carried out in New York City showed that, of all colors, the one that is most recognizable by the human eye from afar is yellow.
It was therefore decided to color city taxis, school buses, and a lot of road signs yellow.
Recently, yellow partly characterized the inauguration of new U.S. President Joe Biden thanks to the pretty yellow coat worn by the young American poet Amanda Gorman, which is destined to remain in the collective visual imagination as a symbol of democratic rebirth.
Yellow is also the sacred color of Thailand’s royalty, as well as the color most closely associated with energy and life (as in the sun, ripe wheat, the spring’s first flowers… and the T-shirts worn by VideoAge’s distribution team at TV trade shows).
Yellow’s impact is so powerful, in fact, that The Beatles were struck by the psychotropic power of a submarine of that color, while Amnesty International chose yellow as the color of their banners and posters to draw attention to the serious international case of Giulio Regeni (an Italian researcher kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Egypt by the police), and to decisively communicate about other cases of human rights abuses.
Yellow signals an emergency when the flashing lights of technical vehicles are on. It encourages us to make quick decisions with extreme attention when it is on a traffic light. And for Buddhists, yellow is also the color of wisdom.
In Milan, Italy, yellow runs throughout the third subway line stations, and is the color of the two main dishes of Milanese cuisine, saffron risotto and the Milanese cutlet. And in chromo therapy, yellow stimulates the appetite and plays a strong attracting function in order to get bees to pollinate.
Thanks to the yellow cover of a successful series published in the past by the Mondadori Publishing Company, today, in Italy, yellow identifies a given book as a thriller.
Yellow is also a primary color that contributes to the formation of all other colors. It was used as a screen on the headlights of French cars until the 1980s, and remained as a fog light for a while thereafter.
Yellow is the color of strong flavors such as lemon, mustard, and turmeric, and characterizes a particular type of Ribolla, an Italian grape variety from the Friuli Venezia Giulia region (but which is also found in Slovenia and on the island of Kefalonia in Greece), from which a very good white wine is obtained.
After this pandemic passes and the industry goes back to its in-person international TV trade shows, VideoAge‘s yellow T-shirts and sweatshirts will once again be seen around convention centers, hotels, and gathering areas. This time, they will symbolize the rebirth of one of the industry’s staples: TV trade shows. Similarly, the city of Parma will use the color yellow to promote the reopening of the city’s public places post-pandemic.
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