Updated Free Survivor Tribal Color Swatches for Illustrator and Photoshop

Another sea­son of Sur­vivor, my favorite tele­vi­sion show, has run its course. In a sur­prise to me and most of the fans of the show, the con­niv­ing and bril­liant tac­ti­cian Rus­sell Hantz won every­thing but the game, being defeated in a lop­sided vote to Natalie White (link). I guess that Sur­vivor can be like chess, in that you can be a bril­liant tac­ti­cian, but if your strat­egy is flawed then even being up in mate­r­ial and posi­tion, you can still be mated.  For more about my strange obses­sion with this show, I refer you to my last post with the topic here.

In honor of another great sea­son I thought I’d update my Sur­vivor tribal color swatches for the Adobe Cre­ative Suite, they are in the Adobe Swatch Exchange for­mat (.ase). They are now updated and include the tribal col­ors for the pre­vi­ous two sea­sons of Sur­vivor, Tocan­tins & Samoa .

Click here to down­load the free color swatches.

Also, today is the win­ter sol­stice and is offi­cially the first day of win­ter here in the North­ern Hemi­sphere. In Seat­tle the rain has been pour­ing for weeks if not months already. How­ever, thanks to Sur­vivor and Her­man Melville I have been trans­ported to the lush and mys­te­ri­ous islands of the South Pacific.  I have begun read­ing a clas­sic in the field of pop­u­lar­iz­ing and mythol­o­giz­ing (for good and ill) the world  of Poly­ne­sia, Typee: A Romance of the South Seas by Her­man Melville (for some rea­son I’ve also seen it sub­ti­tled in some edi­tions as A Peep at Poly­ne­sian Life).

Long before Melville had his read­ers chase a great white whale, he marooned them on more tem­per­ate shores. This book is a highly fic­tion­al­ized account of some of the true adven­tures Melville had as a young sailor when he jumped ship and lived with the natives of Mar­que­sas Islands for three weeks in 1842. Coin­ci­den­tally , the Mar­que­sas played host to a sea­son of Sur­vivor (Sea­son 4).

Schol­ar­ship is divided on the mer­its of Typee as a work of lit­er­a­ture and espe­cially his por­trayal of the native islanders. I find it inter­est­ing that even though Melville is now known pri­mar­ily for Moby Dick, this was by far his most suc­cess­ful work dur­ing his life time.  I think that is because this book is at its heart an adven­ture story of escape in a lush and mys­te­ri­ous land. Which is the under­ly­ing mythol­ogy of the west­ern view of the South Seas, some­thing that Sur­vivor and Poly­ne­sian Pop has cours­ing through their blood­stream. To end here is a quote from Typee that sums this mythol­ogy perfectly:

‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a set­tled thing; next week we shape our course to the Mar­que­sas!’ The Mar­que­sas! What strange visions of out­landish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoanut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bam­boo tem­ples; sunny val­leys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes danc­ing on the flash­ing blue waters—savage wood­lands guarded by hor­ri­ble idols—HEATHENISH RITES AND HUMAN SACRIFICES.

For more information

Online Ver­sions of Typee:

• Project Guten­berg: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1900
• Libravox.org audio book: http://librivox.org/typee-by-herman-melville/

More about Typee:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typee
• Sparks Notes (no cheat­ing, just ref­er­ence… read the book!) http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/typee/

More about Her­man Melville & some of his other works:

• Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville
• http://www.melville.org/
• http://www.mobydick.org/

Sur­vivor:

• http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor

More about Adobe .ase format:

• http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/04/adobe-swatch-exchange-ase-files.html
• http://kuler.adobe.com/links/kuler_help.html

Related posts:

1. Updated Sur­vivor Swatches for the Adobe Cre­ative Suite
2. Adobe Pho­to­Shop (really) Quick Tips