Why do we like some colors more than others, why do some like pastel colors while I like bright? Why do I sometimes like pastel colors?
What attracts me to bright violets, deep pinks, vivid greens? I have a strong belief that these are linked to our memories of childhood like everything else.
Smells of grandma’s kitchen, the musty attic of the old house, tastes of the first foreign dish or mom’s Sunday special. These memories are the foundations for what become special to us
- colors, smells, tastes. I have this vague memory of the smell of Magnolia flowers from the solitary tree on my uncle’s farm where we used to spend our summers as kids. That
magnolia grandiflora tree probably had its own story of how it got there because it was far away from its native southern parts of North America. I remember my grandfather telling me
the name of the tree and me being so impressed that he knew the scientific name of that tree. I remember as a child the very first time I smelled its flower.
It was one of those early morning walks with my cousin or grandfather along the rice fields going to get something from the orchard that was some distance off beyond the pond. This magnolia tree was next to the
old tractor which was probably abandoned decades ago, because it had lodged itself firmly in the ground, sinking a few inches every monsoon. It was rusted but shiny with all the kids riding on it,
pretending it to be everything other than a lowly tractor. It was a WWII fighter for us, on which we flew innumerable sorties. We flew to the Bermuda Triangle on it; dropped rations to victims of Martian attacks; looked for
lost treasures. But every time the magnolia flowered it was my favorite things around. It was an exotic, heady smell unlike anything else till then. That smell etched the memory of that time and space in my head forever
and everything that was from that time and space coalesced around that smell. That heady smell has stayed with me to my adulthood. Much later in life when we moved to Texas I came across magnolia trees again. They are here everywhere
and really not that special. But for me they were a memory of a simpler, happier time. When we were buying our house, having a grown-up magnolia tree in the backyard became a must have criteria. We ended up with a giant magnolia
in our backyard which flowers every summer. Those succulent flowers nestled between leathery leaves form the fond memory of a time of which I don’t have many others.
And that brings me to colors. Though the connection was nor very obvious to me to begin with but became very clear when I started to think about the colors of this website. When I started to build Lens and Atlas I spent agonizing
hours trying to look for colors that represented what the site had to convey. They had to be linked to the themes of wonder and wander, they had to be connected to the journeys taken across continents, they had to show
the vivid bursts of light that we see in the sunrise and landscapes. So, I started looking for inspiration. After a long-winded journey I ended up on Adobe Color
It has fascinating combinations of colors that can probably cater to every idea that there is. The search began again and I ended up with Hermes Beloved India
Once I saw it for the first time there was nothing that could change my mind. This was it. Its bright, its loud and it is now the theme of Lens and Atlas. Why these colors? I did not think about it a lot since very recently.
What makes them special to me? Why this combination? What this particular shade? Maybe they are linked to memories. And then it did make sense when I was watching this movie called "October",
a brilliant story by Juhi Chaturvedi. Good design always catches my eye and the poster of the movie did. The name of the movie has this Shiuli flower
as the second 'O' of October, a reference to one of the lead actors of the movie. Now, Shiuli is a slightly unconventional but fairly common name in my native Bengali. That was not the point. The reason it started the train of thought was because of the color of the flower.
Those flowers have an orange stem that is very close to the color #F27405 of the Lens and Atlas theme. And those flowers have a very special place for me. The Shiuli tree flowers only during the fall season in India during the Bengali festival of Durga
Pujo and for a very short time. The flowers bloom in the night and fall on the ground at dawn literally carpeting the ground in a fragile white and orange sheet. As kids we would get up early in the morning during the Pujo vacation to pick these flowers up and
take them to the temple. The allure of these flowers lay in the fact that they were so short lived and were so fragile yet so consistently there during the happiest season. And that brings me to the other colors from
other flowers – frangipani, hibiscus, aparajita, amaltas,
lemon grass.
These are bright, in your face colors from my childhood from trees that lined the lanes of cities where I grew up, fences I looked beyond, sceneries that wizzed past
on train rides. And the collective memory of these flowers formed the sensibility that translated to the colors of Lens and Atlas. Is there a scientific basis to this idea? I would like to think so but it is really not necessary.
