Back in my undergraduate days at the University of Birmingham (the one in England), I had a particularly entertaining set of lectures on aromatic chemistry from Jim Burdon. I don’t know how he got on to the subject, but during one of the lectures he told us that neutrons were purple, and then went on to discuss the colour of electrons. Now, that’s obviously incredibly silly… we all know that neutrons are a funny green-brown colour (and that electrons are blue).
As we start to put the nuts and bolts of Nature Chemistry in place, we need to make important decisions about colour… what do I mean by that? Well, go and have a look at the Nature Materials homepage – see the red in the banner at the top of the page and in the section headers – that is known in these parts as ‘Materials red’. If you pick up a copy of the print issue, you will see the same red used throughout the journal, particularly as the font colour for titles, headlines and figure captions.
In the same vein, you will see that Nature Geoscience is green (British racing green in fact). Nature Photonics is blue, Nature Physics is blue/purple. Nature Chemical Biology is yet another different shade of blue… Now go to Nature Nanotechnology – that’s a gold-ish colour. In print, however, we use a red (not ‘Materials red’, but, you’ve guessed it, ‘Nano red’) because gold doesn’t really work well for text.
So, along comes Nature Chemistry and it needs its own colour – preferably a consistent one that works for both print and online content. We’re already experimenting with shades of a particular colour here – but I’m not going to tell you which one yet… I want to know what colour you think chemistry is?
Stuart
Stuart Cantrill (Senior Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
Maybe I’ve just seen too many chalkboards filled with arrow-pushing and stereochemistry, but it seems to me the color of chemistry is slate. You could also go with green, but it might make too much of a statement about the content of the journal (green chemistry, get it?!).
Perkin’s mauve?
I like slate, but I think the same could be said for too many chalk boards of mechanics equations, and other physics or maths stuff.
You could take your inspiration from various chemicals – a nice potassium permanganate purple-pink could be eye catching, a beautiful copper sulfate blue quite relaxing, or a luminous colour more reminiscent of the neon lights in the city! I was thinking about orange, in the rich, vibrant and cheerful sense. One of those colours that makes you feel quiet positive and cheerful. That has to be a good thing for a publication!
For me chemistry has always been a tie-dye mixture of colors. At the end of the semester in my intro organic lab we made tie-dye shirts/labcoats, and since then I’ve always associated this huge burst of color with chemistry. That might not work for Nature Chemistry though—not professional enough I guess 😉 Instead, a dark orange/red color might do the trick…
International Warning Orange!
The IWO sticker on my plastic bucket of silica gel says, “¡Aviso! Niños pueden caer adentro de el balde y ahogarse. Retire los niños delos baldes aunque solamente tengan un poco de agua.” (Kids with teeth will lick sweat from a retired bald sunbathing aunt?)
England named a university after an Alabama one, how cheeky…
Grey for graphite might work. But, then it will have that professional look instead of that NaturePhotonics look of “I’m new and I’m cool”. Although, grey could also make it easier to contrast cool images against down the road…
My labcoat is the colour of chemistry:
dull white with flecks of ill-defined, brownish-black filth.
I think joel takes the cake with his labcoat color, but that probably won’t do for the journal. My vote goes for a nice non-obnoxious, balanced shade of orange. Since slate/grey is nice, but multi-disciplinary…
I also think of brown – the color that my air-sensitive compounds would turn when they’d gone bad. And the color of many a chemical reaction gone awry. Something warm and rich would be nice, like a mocha brown.
I think the color of chemistry is a transparent lime-green, the color of the eye-protection goggles I had to wear in high school, college, grad school — and that I have my students wear now.