Crayon Innovation

The other day while surfing Buzzfeed I ran across this chart depicting the evolution of color’s in a Crayola box: From eight in 1903 to 120 today. At first it just seemed like a nice and interesting image and I quickly posted it on Tumblr (that being what you’re supposed to do with data visualizations about nostalgic subjects).

Then later I was thinking about it some more and clicked back over to examine the chart again. There’s something incredibly quaint about “crayon innovation.” Frankly, I find the growth of the crayon box a whole lot less offensive than putting five razor blades on a stick.

January 19, 2010