64 Shades of Wax

The image above, from Stephen Von Worley of Weather Sealed, charts the evolution of Crayola’s color range over the past century or so.  He writes:

To create the chart, [he] gently scraped Wikipedia’s list of Crayola colors, corrected a few hues, and added the standard 16-count School Crayon box available in 1935.

Except for the dayglow-ski-jacket-inspired burst of neon magentas at the end of the ’80s, the official color set has remained remarkably faithful to its roots!

Ever industrious, Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56% annually.  For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law,” which states:

The number of colors doubles every 28 years!

Good thing we’re doing our project in 2010!  Apparently by 2050 Crayola will have over 330 shades of wax.

This excellent chart discovered via BoingBoing a few months ago– I hope it will make up for our absence here lately…  a bit?