I was living in Aberdeen, Washington and doing volunteer work and developing my ideas via blog. I chose a brown, blue and white color scheme because I wanted to easily make things better without a lot of time, money and effort.
There were a lot of boxy brown buildings made with nice brick. I thought they were attractive.
But there were all these brown buildings in a place that gets up to eighty inches of rain a year, so it's almost always overcast. Brown buildings and a perpetually grey sky gets seriously depressing.
I wanted to add a few bright spots. So that's part of why I chose this Mid Century Modern color scheme that I had seen before and really liked.
The executive director of the local Main Street program suggested green at some meeting. He talked about the lumber industry in the area.
That's the past. Aberdeen used to be "The Lumber Capital of the World." during an era when a lot of that lumber was used to build wooden ships. Trees were clear cut and ships began being made with steel. That's never coming back.
But it's a coastal town and the sea will always be there and I feel it's a more sophisticated reference anyway.
So what I did was chose the main color of some of the most attractive buildings we already had and picked a color scheme that I felt would enhance what we already had by adding a few bright flourishes.
When I wrote about cycling infrastructure, it was originally published on a site called Pedestrian Coast and that link is a cut down version, but I was envisioning using inverted U racks in white and/or bright blue. The locals stole my idea, used some other style of bicycle rack in dark brown and put them mostly in terrible locations.
We already had plenty of brown. I didn't want to say "that's a bad thing" and I didn't feel it was. I would have zero problem with someone building more attractive brown brick buildings.
But I was thinking of metal bike racks like jewelry to pretty up the place and the literature says you should try to make sure they catch the eye and are noticeable.