It started with a 1962 ink guide from a printer in Aarhus, bought for twenty kroner at a flea market. Ten years later there are around two hundred of them on a shelf in the studio: paint charts, ink books, a fan deck from a Swiss paper mill and a tin of enamel samples from a car factory.
Every era has a palette
Lay the guides out by decade and you can watch taste change. The fifties are soft and chalky. The seventies are brown, orange and avocado. The nineties go neon and then grey. What looked most modern at the time dates fastest.
The colours that never date
A few colours appear in almost every guide, from every decade: a warm red, a deep blue, a strong yellow and a near-black that is not quite black. They are the colours of signs, stamps and packaging that had to work, not just look current.
That is why most of my palettes start from one of those dependable colours and add one that belongs to the brand alone. The dependable one carries the brand for decades. The other gives it a voice.
Made to be used
The old guides are also a lesson in craft. Each swatch is printed, cut and bound, with the ink recipe beside it. They were made for a press floor, so the labels are big, the numbers are clear and the order makes sense.
The fan deck at the top of this site is a small tribute to them. Every project is a swatch, with a code, a colour and a recipe, because that is still the most honest way I know to show what a colour can do.