What really irritated me is that the person has no idea about what they're talking about.
- The color most closely tied to this trend is Nardo Grey, to that point that cars that don't come from the brand that brought it out (Audi) still get referred to by that name: https://touchupdirect.com/blog/what-is-nardo-grey/
- It already has a more suitable disparaging name than "wet putty look", it's the "primer look": Because the cars look like someone covered them in primer, then clear coat, and skipped the paint to save a few bucks. Of course that's not actually how or why it's done, but if you're going to write an article with half empty angst about it, at least use the one insult that actually kind of checks out.
- Murdered-out doesn't mean "matte black" at all, it just means most of the car's parts were made black (by tinting/plastidip/wrap/paint, etc), regardless of if it's a metallic black, flat black, or matte black. They kept on using such a simple to look-up term wrong and it just really grated my nerves each time.
There's a bunch of smaller things that just scream "I googled a bunch of random words, didn't quite get the meaning, but I'm still going to act like I know a lot about this".
"if you're looking at something painted vantablack in broad daylight, you only see a silhouette"
If you scroll down the linked page, there is a photo of a vantablack BMW taken with a flashlight and a cell phone, and it simply looks like a dull gray when some light is pointed at it:
It seems like common sense to me that if you're looking at a picture on the internet that is staged just so, it is trivial to get all the "black" pixels to be exactly zero, but that doesn't tell you much about the quality of the material or how it would look to a person.
Like many things in life the difference between a murdered out car and just a black car is in the details. a matte black car without tinted windows is just a black car.
"You can have any color you want as long as it's black" isn't the selling point. The selling point is- "This car was designed to be black, and looks better in black than other cars."
It's like how my screwdriver is significantly better at driving screws than my swiss army knife. Purposeful design drives a better experience
People who murder out cars with matte black wrap all the time, but people also murder out cars that already black by adding black wheels, wrapping the trim and slapping on 5% tint all the time. Call it being cheap?
I was about to write my own diatribe, but found yours first.
Yeah, something like 10 years ago there was a web designer who took an Art 101 class, where the teacher told them to never use pure black paint. Because black objects in the real world appear to the viewer as a dark gray.
This is all true! On a canvas, painting a black car—which uses actual black paint in real life—using pure black paint, will not look right. The painting is supposed to "have its own light" included. So you must represent what the object would look like under the lighting conditions of the world you're recreating. Highlights are not different colors in real life, but they are on a painting.
But anyway, so this web designer, fresh from his Art 101 course, decided to write some blog post about it, and it's been accepted wisdom ever since.
1) We're not painting cars here, we're writing text. I don't load up "dark gray" ink in my fountain pen, nor do I use a "dark gray" toner in my printer. I would much rather the text on my screen be the same.
2) Contrast is good for legibility. Make the contrast as sharp as possible. Or, if you don't want that harsh look, then darken the background instead of lightening the text. Not too much, just enough to please your aesthetic sense while maintaining readability.
Interesting, I've used it a bunch over the years and never encountered a non-black car. Which is actually kind of silly when you think about it -- a silver Mercedes is just as classy as a black one, if that's what you're concerned with (I'm actually more interested in getting a livery driver who knows what they're doing).
Those coatings are designed to absorb radar, and as a side effect absorb visual frequencies “differently” than “normal” objects we’re used to seeing.
Taken to the next level, anything coated with something like Vantablack [1] “looks phtotoshopped” based on our previous visual experiences with everyday materials.
I don't see anything wrong with the sentence. The black paint tricks the viewer's normal perception of the car as a three-dimensional shape, to make it seem like it's two-dimensional. Are you understanding it differently?
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