Let’s turn our attention now to the new fall lineup of crayon colors for the five hundred packs. First is the much-anticipated Eulogy: a dark grey, black crayon with hints of yellow to suggest remembrance. This is the perfect color to help your child come to grips with the somber emotions of death, loss, and the unfulfilled life in general. However, the yellow represents a counter point, showing the glimpses of hope and memory that permeate our life. Eulogy has been hyped around the Crayola factor since the reclusive and brilliant color engineer Jeff Remstein hatched the idea in nineteen-ninety-eight, the peak year for color design since the late sixties, when a new wave of color engineers came in and revolutionized color creation.
William M. Dearheart, a veteran of the drably colored fifties, says: “Jeff was the freshest face in crayons; it was like the New Wave all over again. He was the first to suggest the fully, fully realized collection of the one thousand or even twenty-four hundred pack. Just revolutionary stuff. Reminded me of the time April Fox [1] came into my office and told me about her new idea for a blend of red and orange to be a standard. I remember telling her then ‘April, you’re crazy!’ I didn’t want to make that mistake again, so I just leapt at the chance.” Jeff left the company in early two thousand and two, citing the stagnation of the color department as his main reason.
However, last year he returned to the company, now in charge of the entire color engineering department, saying he would bring “Rejuvenation and spunk back to color design industry” and many color ideas from his earlier stint have been resurrected, including this most revolutionary and special of all colors.
Another upcoming color is the equally hyped Graduation, described by Color Coordinator Janice Morrison[2] as: “A bright dark and sonorous blue of academy with uplifts of yellow around the tip and underlying color of black, with a side fringe of green, really an electrifying combination, giving you all sides of life, the highlights: fame and the like, the low points, and the suburban tranquility that is at the edges. I mean, like, two years ago, no way, that would have been a no go, way to inventive, almost a color overload.” Graduation is said to be Remstein’s favorites of his own designs, citing that “color overload”, the rich palate of colors from which this color draws so liberally from, to be chief in his love of it. In an interview earlier this year upon his retake of the color engineering division, he said: “I made Graduation during my own graduation ceremony, doodling on the back of a little leaflet they’d given us, and I mean, just your standard eight pack, but still, when I saw those colors together I though, wow, I mean that was graduation, right there, that was life. It was the sort of color that challenged that demanded, it was the type of color I wanted to make, and I just had. It was a goose bumps moment.”
Touring the Crayola Department for Color Engineering last month, I could already feel the change, a new energy that has gripped the department, a coursing tide that has swept up everybody here. Even the interns have a new look of determination as they sashay down the hallways in their crisp Polo shirts and steaming trays of Starbucks mochas. Tom and Tracy[3], the twins who were giving me the tour, smiled at one another, Tracy nodding her head with the dimples forming quite lovely in the corners of her mouth, Tom turning to me and saying threw his own plaster stuck grin, “That’s Lobster Stew if I ever saw one.”
“Wouldn’t it need more red?” I asked, quickly ducking as a tray of freshly canvassed colors piled up on top of each other whirling down the corridor on a dolly trey pushed with the frantic effort of deadlines.
“Everyone says that,” Tracy shot me a grin, stepping to the side in time for another cart to whirl past her, nearly hitting me in the stomach, and she laughed[4], myself then blushing, as she said “It’s more of an orange, kinda brown with hints of white. But Remstein, he decided that Lobster Stew is a creamy off-white.”
“Like mocha.” Tom adds, stopping to talk to a flustered wire haired man with the grey streaks in his skin, who I swear I have seen talk to these two at least fifty times on the jaunt down this short angular hallway, a constant stream of small stops, Tracy and I talking quietly as Tom takes care of the harried man.
As we approach the elevators, I see the doors, newly designed as is this whole wing of the building, with painting utensils and tarps laid out on the marble[5]. They were covered by white boards, on which had every single color of Crayola crayon colored in, with the name and serial number of each under it, breathe taking in its sensory overload. I gasped and the two smiled between each other again as Tom reach out. “How many colors are there?”
“Two thousand one hundred and seven.”
“And counting.”
The Color Coordination Department first was founded in the early nineties, after the majority of New Wave colorists had retired, and the Crayola brand was attempting to bring in new blood. It was erected under the management of Julius Berkeley[6], who is the reason for the scoffed at tile and the boxy utilitarian shape of the building. It’s located about ten miles from the Crayola headquarters, just within the verdant auspices of Forks Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. It sticks out from the fields of Pennsylvania like a poorly formed metaphor in a well written paragraph, almost the epitome of the corporate footprint lodged within these pastures of nearly Germanic looks, even this close to the seaside, fields where the Amish actually look placed at their correct chronological and geographical order, indeed where you seem to peer over you’re wheel, looking in desperation for that Dutch windmill and Dutch milkmaid that you are sure are waiting just around the next bend.
And then, if you Travel down the rather ironically named Pastor Road, your eyes will be assaulted by that object of rectangular obscenity planted severely in the center of this pastoral paradise. The building itself looks like one of those Soviet block apartments on its exterior, all grey cement blocks and tiny windows cut in deep so that they provide about half the light of a normal window. Tom tells out of the corner of his mouth that the entire building was built by Berkley to destroy creativity. When I asked why color design building would want to squash the creativity of its members, he only said. “Berkley was fascist.” Tracy laughs, saying something about losing and Nazis that I don’t catch.
Another color being churned out this year is Ecstasy, a new color for what is being dubbed the “Adults Only” Crayola pack. Remstein has said of the color that it’s a delightful wicked color, a bright pink with “manic symphony designs” of lime-green running through it. It surprised the Crayola executives when it was introduced to them at the Color Conference last year[7] when it was introduced to them by a rave like display of seven nearly naked and definitely topless women dancing in smoke as a the color came to life on the wall behind these gyrating bodies. According to Tracy, who didn’t disclose how she knew, it received a standing ovation and instant approval. Remstein first came up with this idea as an attempt at the end of his original tenure at Crayola company to shock and disturb the execs, but he said that the idea being a hit “is probably just as good, I mean it was so much fun to come up with Ecstasy, like showing a side to color that your just don’t get in a kid’s box. It had verve, a kinda naked sex appeal, and I think maybe more colors should be like that.” The Adults Only Crayola crayons are scheduled to be in the final stages of design next month and in an “adult themed store near you” next February.
One of the most unique aspects of the Color Coordination department is their name tags. In most respects they are perfectly normal, the sort of picture that makes even the most appealing faces in the flesh look blemished and stretched or compressed or so washed out they look vampire-ish, the name spelt out in capitols and a bar code running along its inner edge. What separates them is that in the upper right hand corner of each, directly next to each persons picture is a dot of a certain color, a miniature version of the ones that cover the exterior doors of the elevators.
I first noticed this when Tom and Tracy had come to collect me for the guided tour, spotting the tiny marks as I shook hands but still to slickly nervous to ask as they brought me in through the imposing glass doors of the sore concrete thumb, gulping as I entered the lobby, filled with fern bushes and blue walls, and I hadn’t managed to work myself up about it until I had seen the elevator doors. Inside as we were heading down, I asked about the colors. Tracy laughed and pulled her name tag up so I could better examine the color. “Everyone here gets a color assigned to them after a few weeks.”
“It’s based on what people think your personality is,” Tom chips in, Tracy sticking her tongue out at him. “She’s brown.”
“I see, but what shade, chestnut or-“
They laugh in unison. “Just brown, regular old eight pack brown.”
“They’re vindictive bastards,” Tracy said, “They gave us eight pack colors because we were already on the fast track then.”
I’m not exactly eloquent in person and only am able to sort of smile and nod in vigorous something or another, as they started a rant that seemed to have been preplanned, although more as inside joke then anything else as the elevator sedately moved to basement floor. All of a sudden Tom noticed me again fully and stopped the tirade. He sheepishly grinned and said “Sorry about that.”
“Yeah, it’s just a bad subject to start us off on.”
“It’s fine,” I say trying to recover some of my reporter-for-this-most-prestigious-newspaper by asking the first question to spring to mind. “What color do you think I’d get?”
Tracy cocked her head to the side; Tom bit his lower lip and started to nibble on it. I waited through several seconds of uncomfortable silence.
Tom spoke first, “Orange.”
Tracy looked quizzically at him then said, “A dark blue. Maybe navy.”
I smiles and wrote both the suggestions down.
Crayola very rarely grants reporters access to the Color Coordination Department, and while there is no official stance, most think it has something to do with competition. After all, why let people see your brand new color ideas when you know that they’ll just be ripped off a few days after the report by one of the sixteen hundred different crayon manufacturers.[8] Yet there is not a disjointed feel to this tour, it’s a fluid and seamless as if they churn out these tours like crayon colors. Tom and Tracy handle it like old pros, moving effortlessly from their slick company talk to me, to the business tone they adopt when fellow employees rush up and quickly converse, the other of the wonder twins standing back with nonchalance and giving me a type of knowing wink I’ve only ever seen before in Yorkshire men[9] and whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the glass of offices I could see only the curved c of my spine as I both went forward to hear and struggled back to stay as far from any actual contact as possible.
This is the type of reporting that makes me antsy, the type where I look on the outside like one of those shy people who ends of slamming lead into the ceiling, walls, floor, and patrons of a post office, and on the inside I’m tapping my fingers anxiously on my jeans as I’m led through the phony wonders of America’s consumerist temples. But the Color Coordination Department is not phony, its wonderment is true, as I’m led onto a packed floor of marble tile, each tile hosting an art deco representation of the original eight crayons splayed out in a coronet. The insignia of the Color Coordination department is the doing of the “staff communist”[10] from the early twentieth century, the notorious and arch “satirical” color designer, Harman Frank. Frank was a German refugee, who came over to America just before the Second World War, although even his closest friends are unsure about his choice to move to America, despite an offer from a friend in England to stay there until Frank was able to return to Germany.
One reasons for his decision to emigrate to America was undoubtedly the Color Coordination Department of Crayola, which was even then the most interesting of the crayon color maker, with over twelve colors in their general rotation, and fifteen available to the connoisseur of such things. But Frank’s entry into the business also marked the beginning of various austerity measures within the Color Coordination Department of Crayola. The architect of most was the controversial “color magnate” Joseph H. Manning, a frequent foe of Frank’s[11]. Eventually, and in no small part thanks to Manning’s help, Herman Frank was brought before the House’s Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted.
According to Dearheart: “Frank’s blacklist, if I’m honest, almost killed the industry. It was such a blow to all of us who’d grown up with Frank’s colors splashed all over our scrap paper. I know he was my inspiration for entering the damn business, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one feels that way.”
Certainly among Frank’s admirers is Jeff Remstein, who when asked his favorite color created in the last century, immediately said “Herman Frank’s Lilac Sonata. It was such a pure color, a dark teal inspired by Monet’s visions of his Lily Ponds, and it really captures that sense of stillness. Frank was the master, no question.”
Remstein leaves an instant impression on you. When Tracy and Tom dropped me off in his office, Remstein had his back to us, looking over the vast Color Coordination department, with what seemed like a million color engineers mixing and toiling away, eager to impress the man in designer spectacles and Milanese fitted clothes. Remstein turns around with a grin, and slapped his hands around mine. He gave me a grin like the Vegas strip. It’s like meeting the president. Dearheart says that the first day he met Remstein, “I was instantly amazed. Remstein, he’s got the magnetism of Patton, he made everyday feel like it was one in the trenches. It was a war, even with the virtual monopoly of Color Coordination. It was a war against boredom, against repetition, against ourselves, and love him or loath him, Remstein made every damn person feel like a vital cog in his grand design.”
Remstein was eager to go over the whole fall line up of colors. He described each new addition to the twenty-four hundred pack in the kind of detail that _____ ______ Review of Books[12] has called for years: “A florid and verbose prosaic style, putting us in mind of a latter day Ben Johnson, although lacking the obsolescence”. As we finish, Remstein leaves me with the general theme of this year’s colors. “It’s a bold reinvisioment, but also a return t basics. It’s about raw emotion, and droll touches. In one word it’s absolutely paradoxical.
Not everyone is as enamored of Jeff Remstein as his fellows at Crayola. His most outspoken critic is the notorious color engineer, Omerta. Omerta, who got his name from supposed mob connections on his father’s side and, to quote him, “Art school pretensions and general bullshit”. In the color creation field, he first gained true notoriety for his “Classic Reds” range, consisting of the normal five crayon box that “had an artistic repetition of the classic red, the color I always seemed to run out of. It was sort of a personal collection, I admit, maybe even selfish”. However, it did earn him a place in the new school of color creation, and was the centerpiece of the Omerta exhibition at MoMA last year. “I found it simply sublime,” says Martha Kopek, the curator who really pushed the Omerta exhibit. “After the maximalist approach of Jeff Remstein, this was a breath of fresh air.”
For himself, Omerta thinks Remstein is “a grand standing fool, who cares more for publicity then for art or color creation. He rarely even makes the colors, just spews out a bunch of platitudes and random color combinations, then tells his ‘wizards’ to cook it up. And well, that’s missing the point, isn’t it?”
Omerta has a clear vision of what he wants to do with the dying company Royal, a crayon maker from the early 1800’s and a once formidable rival of the Crayola, but ever since the Remstein tenure, there’s really been no contest to speak of in the Color Creation business. But Omerta has big plans for his newest color collection, a follow up to his Classic Reds”, yet in his words “it’s more mainstream, definitely less personal”. Simply entitled, the classics, this is a five color box, representive of the minimlist approach Omerta has been trying to master. A simple Blue, Yellow, Black, White, and (of course) Red. Omerta chose to not include Green or Violet, as they were, in his own words, spoiling the line.
“It’s about simplicity, it’s about the user creating their own colors, it’s about experimentation and freedom. Any fascistic designer can producer a bland and useless creation, but I feel our users are better suited to know what the color they’re looking for is. And if they can’t find it in our box, it’s a lack of their damn imagination and skill. Besides, have you seen the basic colors for Crayola recently? They’re shit, I mean totally useless. The red doesn’t look like red, its too light, almost orange, and yellow is so sickly you can’t see it on white paper.” On a spectrum, he shows me the difference between the Yellow from his “Classics” and the standard Crayola yellow. “See how much richer the color is? How it just shouts to you? Well, I don’t see how a company that can’t get that, the simplist color really, correct, how is it going to stay in business?”
Remstein, meanwhile, is unmoved by such statements. “Our colors have always been the most lustrious on the market, and we have always possessed the lion’s share of variety, not to mention originality. Going back to basics is pointless, you have to be in constant state of advancement, or the form simply disinigrates. If Omerta had his way, we’d still have all grays in our boxes. Well, I say, to hell with blandness. I want some epizazz in my crayon box!”
The Crayola collection will be on show from August 16th to the 22nd of September at the Louvre in Paris, before going on general sale October 1st.
[1] The self-described “foxy feminist” leader of the New Wave color engineers, who was responsible for many of their greatest achievements. She would go on to be influential in the color coordination of the earliest LGBT, meeting two of her later spouses there, Mike Jones and Beatrice Threepenny, whom she married only last year. She was also the mentor to the young Jeff Remstein, before the Number Controversy, which severed their connections.
[2] The cousin of noted and notorious Kyle Morrison, of Late Night with Kyle Morrison fame.
[3] Known throughout the entire department as the Wonder Twins, a reference neither of them actually got until they were explained it by the “retro guru” Casey Dearheart, daughter of the Jurassic William M.,
[4]Tracy has the kind of sweetly innocent smile that unfailingly reminds one of a childhood sweetheart.
[5] “Bubblegum pink,” Tracy had said as we had entered the department, Tom explaining how that was the left over from the old management.
[6] Julius Berkeley is the well known butt of jokes around the office, mainly for his role in the repression of design that characterized his tenure as Color Coordinator head, including the issuing the replacement of the traditional eight crayon box with one that consisted simply of black white and variations of grey, during the World War 2.
[7] You might remember hearing about the event, held for the first time outside the United States, in Toronto where the small color collective Bonanza Tones (created with help by Jeff Remstein himself) who held the most lavish event since the 1976 Color Conference in Las Vegas where the entertainment included a short film on color by Stanley Kubric and a surprise appearance by Frank Sinatra, this one had nearly 4 million spent on several indoor fireworks displays, and that was for the low end color peddlers arena spread out overt six warehouses.
[8] Everyone around the Color Coordination Department calls this the Willy Wonka Theory. They all laugh when I quiz them about it, saying that it would have taken months for any competitor to duplicate the colors. They say its more about the actually disturbance of the color creation process. Tracy summed it up for me by saying “You wouldn’t want a bunch ignorant philistines coming in all the time and mucking with your writing right? Well, for most of us that’s the same thing..” Clearly, she is naïve of editors and their red pens.
[9] For those who have never been to Yorkshire, I can say only that it was one of the most arduous and painful experiences of my life, which by the wa
y includes numerous trips to France. Although France was still worse.[10] Harman Frank was not a communist. He was a self-identified anarchist and is defined by his biographer, Charles Manning, as a “probable socialist”.
[11] Frank, who died broke, was heard cursing Manning on his deathbed, though his landlady refused to repeat whatever he’d said.
[12] EDITOR’S NOTE: The editor felt that it was relevant to delete the name of a competitor magazine, in the interest of balance for this piece.
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