Who said police work was dull? These are the subtle and understated uniforms of a Bangladeshi police unit, as seen during the country’s recent general election. Maybe there actually is such a thing as the Fashion Police.
Hat tip to Mr E. Larson at the International Camouflage Uniform Society for bringing this to my attention. Don’t know how I could have missed it!
Regular readers will remember me mentioning a design brief that my company Hyde Definition fulfilled last summer. It was to reduce the visual impact of a domestic wind turbine erected on private property in the UK, and the client wanted to be able to apply the design himself, in situ. Our website has recently been updated to include photographs of the turbine’s camouflage scheme, kindly supplied by our client.
Realising that it is practically impossibly to conceal an object as large and obvious as a wind turbine against the constantly changing skyscape behind it, we chose to break up the shape and use different tones that will blend in some, but not all, conditions.
The bespoke design uses two shades of grey, plus white, applied over the black polycarbonate gearbox nacelle and triangular fin in a pixellated quadrilateral symmetry-axis disruption pattern. In plain speak, picture a flat image of the turbine head, with a line running along the centre of the nacelle, and a line running down the middle of the fin. Imagine that lines also extend inward from all the corners and join the central lines near their ends. These are the axes of internal symmetry, which is not a name for the next James Bond film, but is the central mass that needs to be broken up in order to deceive the eye, which we achieved by using square and rectangular serrated shapes in different sizes and orientations.
Test your colour IQ
You will have fun with this neat little game. Simply arrange rows of coloured tiles in order, grading from one hue to another – at the end you submit your result for a score between 0 and 99, where zero is perfect. I got 8, and my eyes are old and bent. Be warned, though – staring at the small squares of colour for a time, under an artificial light source, at the end of a long day that finishes a long week, can physically hurt!
Having myself just completed a contract to design a pixellated “digital” camo scheme for a privately owned wind turbine, I found this press release by my North American competitor Guy Cramer, of Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corp (I`m guessing he just loves sci-fi!), interesting:
Invisible Towers (See: Invisible Towers).has acquired an exclusive license from HyperStealth to wrap cellular towers within the United States with HyperStealth Camouflage patterns using the HyperStealth “Consealment™” 3M Printed Adhesive Vinyl. In 2007 Invisible Towers won an industry wide award for Innovation after wrapping two towers in 2006 with HyperStealth Consealment Camouflage to meet regulatory and/or community approval.
The four color HyperStealth Cloudcam version used on the Baltimore cellular tower uses White, Tan, Gray and Sky Blue as the only concealment required is for the variable sky conditions.
Cloudcam pattern on a Cellular tower being erected in Baltimore.
I`m Dom Hyde, and I run Hyde Definition, a camouflage design and camo clothing business. With this weblog I intend to explore and share the myriad ways that camouflage is a part of our lives.
