[gartdavis]

One way to think about this is that color is information. We have a processing capacity for this information that became fully saturated somewhere between 1967 and 1973, and since then we've been creating a surplus that everyone has to filter out as noise. In that context, it makes sense to me that consumers (and marketers, and product designers) now choose simplicity over the radiant chaos of Jackson Pollock, Peter Max, or Ronald McDonald.