NUMB & NUMBER.

Above:  The web’s most clicked color.

000080 may sound a bit like the unlucky name of a secret agent, out of a Ian Fleming’s unlucky novel.  Truth is: 000080 is a lucky number, being the most clicked color on the worldwide web. It’s  more popular than Yellow Submarine, Simply Red and the All Blacks, combined. Ant that’s because you are more likely to click a link with this color than any other in the palette. We all know we are governed by numbers and Statistics is the measure of all things. Out faith in numbers is so strong that we generate an even stronger, self-replicating trend. This explains why more and more people choose 000080 as The Color of Choice. Not because it’s beautiful or fits the aesthetic needs of our message, but only beacuse Google Stats tell us it works better. This behavior, obviously, transforms an initial evidence into an Absolute Truth. It’s like a snowball: once it starts to roll downhill, you can’t stop it. And grows bigger. But Statistics starts as a set of consistent assumptions aiming to provide just an ‘idealized’ description of a questionable mechanism. It’s not precise, not to mention infallible.

Stats, for instance, forget to add that the more people are going to choose this color, the more omologated this will become. The brandpowder’s graph clearly shows how the blue line, representing the statistical model of mass behavior, leads to its rapid growth as much as its inevitable decline. The red line, by contrast, expresses a more individual adoption, based on personal taste rather than omologated response. You can see a twisty but steadily growing force in it.

Statistics, according to the elegant intuition of Eric Leo Lehmann, is based – itself – on statistic information. It’s not as accurate as we tend to think. Creativity should abandon this flimsy side of maths and go back to a more risky, uncharted, but much more exciting approach to work. Art is unpredictable and fun. Numbers, if not properly read and understood, can be just numb.

Note: the term Statistics, in this article, is used as singular when defining the science, as plural when referring to numbers.