Alright, so today I wanted to talk a bit about my run-in with something we called "eminence purple." Sounds fancy, right? Well, let me tell you, it was a journey.
The Beginning of the Purple Haze
It all started a while back. We were working on this new project, a refresh, you could say. And someone, somewhere up the chain, decided that "eminence purple" was going to be the signature color. We got the memo, the hex codes, the RGB values, the whole shebang. Easy peasy, I thought. Just plug in the numbers, and boom, eminence purple everywhere.
My first task was to get it onto our website mockups. So, I fired up my design software, punched in the code, and there it was. Looked pretty decent on my screen, a nice deep purple. I sent off the first batch of designs. Pat on the back, job done. Or so I thought.
When Purple Isn't Just Purple
Then the feedback started trickling in. "Is this the right purple? Looks a bit reddish on my end." Then another: "Mine looks almost blue, are you sure you used the code?" My screen showed one thing, my colleague's another. The boss's monitor? A completely different beast. It was like "eminence purple" was a chameleon, changing its shade depending on who was looking and what they were looking on.
We started doing tests. Seriously, actual tests.
- We checked it on different browsers.
- We viewed it on different operating systems.
- We even printed it out, and oh boy, the print version was a whole other can of worms. That looked more like a sad, murky violet.
The original hex code, the one handed down from on high, seemed to be more of a suggestion than a rule. It was wild. I spent days, I kid you not, just tweaking. A bit more red here, a touch less blue there. Then I'd send it around, and the same cycle would start. "Too dark." "Too light." "That's not what I saw in the presentation."
The Great Purple Debate
It got to the point where we had meetings, actual meetings, about this one color. People brought in their laptops, their phones, all displaying slightly different shades of "eminence purple." We talked about monitor calibration, color profiles, ambient lighting. It felt like we were in some kind of art school critique, but with more spreadsheets and frustrated sighs.
I remember one day, I just stared at my screen, at like ten different versions of this purple, and I thought, what even is "eminence purple"? Is it the code? Is it the feeling it's supposed to evoke? Who knows! The person who picked it probably just saw it on some fancy swatch card under perfect lighting and said, "That one!" without a clue about the digital nightmare it would unleash.
I dug through so many articles, trying to understand why it was so difficult. Learned a lot about sRGB, Adobe RGB, P3 color gamuts – stuff I never thought I'd need to know just to make a button purple. Turns out, getting colors to look the same everywhere is a massive headache. Who knew?
Living with Eminence Purple
So, where did we land? Well, we eventually settled on a version. Or rather, several versions. One for digital, one for print, and even then, we kind of just crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. It’s not perfect. Sometimes I still see it on a different device and wince a little because it’s not quite our eminence purple.
It taught me a lot, though. Mostly that something that seems simple, like a color, can be incredibly complex when you try to make it consistent in the real world. And that sometimes, you just have to pick your battles, find a good enough version, and move on. That "eminence purple" saga... man, it was something else. Still gives me a chuckle when I think about all the fuss over a shade of purple.
