Readers:

When I was a young boy, I loved to color with my big box of Crayola Crayons. I would pull out blank sheets of paper and create multi-colored masterpieces (at least my mother said so).

Crayola’s crayon chronology tracks their standard box, from its humble eight color beginnings in 1903 to the present day’s 120-count lineup. According to Crayola, of the seventy-two colors from the official 1975 set – sixty-one survive. [1]

A creative dataviz type who goes by the name Velociraptor (referred from here as “Velo”) created the chart below to show the historical crayonology (I just made that word up!) of Crayola Crayons colors.

Velo gently scraped Wikipedia’s list of Crayola colors, corrected a few hues, and added the standard 16-count School Crayon box available in 1935.

Except for the dayglow-ski-jacket-inspired burst of neon magentas at the end of the ’80s, the official color set has remained remarkably faithful to its roots!

Ever industrious, Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56% annually. For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law,” which states:

The number of colors doubles every 28 years!

If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons! [1]

A Second Version

Velo was not satisfied with his first version, so he produced the second version below. [2]

A Third Version (and interactive too!)

Click through to the interactive version for a larger view with mouseover color names!

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References:

[1] Stephen Von Worley, Color Me A Dinosaur, The History of Crayola Crayons, Charted, Data Pointed, January 15, 2010, http://www.datapointed.net/2010/01/crayola-crayon-color-chart/.

[2] Stephen Von Worley, Somewhere Over The Crayon-Bow, A Cheerier Crayola Color Chronology, Data Pointed, October 14, 2010, http://www.datapointed.net/2010/10/crayola-color-chart-rainbow-style/.