I was browsing the philosophy tag (again), and I found a post that reminded me of my love for grayscale color schemes.

I’m sure most of you already know what greyscale is, but take a moment to get the idea fresh in your mind. Gray-scale is the spectrum of shades between black and white. It is devoid of colour without being devoid of variation.

Grey-scale is simultaneously everything that life is and everything that life isn’t, depending on your perspective. If you choose to see gray scale as a series of shades you’ve acknowledged its capacity for infinite variation, but if you choose to see it as being constructed only from black and white you’ve acknowledged its fundamental, binary nature. By the same coin, looking at grey scale as the template upon which other colors are built, a series of shades independent of the very concept of colour, suggests an objective beauty and a freedom from bias. But looking at it as being devoid of color suggests incompleteness.

And what happens when we add colour to our grayscale? What have we changed? On the one hand, it’s still just a series of shades; we haven’t altered the greyscale, merely observed it through filter. On the other, we’ve completely changed the gray-scale by giving it what it previously lacked and giving it a definite place in the color wheel.

Think that through. We’ve left it the same, yet it’s completely different.

What does that mean for the rest of our colourful world? Are all of our colors just grey scale at their roots, or are they now something completely different? Are they the essence of variation, or merely an extension? And if they’re an extension of black and white, why are they so diverse?

Well, little fish?