color-coded items

Hello

This is about Toy Story 2:

Steve was squinting over the color-coded items of posters, trailers, billboards, release dates, promotions for the soundtrack album and for toys based on the movie’s characters, and so on.

I need to understand better the idea behind this. Anyone, please?

Thanks!

"Color coding" is the assigning of different colors to things according to the categories they fall into. I have no idea what might be being "color-coded" here. Perhaps each character has a color, and items for one character are in red boxes, folders, and other containers, those pertaining to another character are all in blue containers, a third's items are all in green containers, etc. Anyway, that should give you an idea of what "color-coding" is.

Often, on this board, moderator comments in a message are in green so that you can distinguish them from what the original correspondent wrote. That's another example of "color-coding."

Color-coding is a generic term for any system that allows you to classify things into groups. For example, a store might have a sale where all the items with yellow tags are discounted 20% and all the items with red tags are discounted 40%.

There isn't enough context here to know the specifics of the color-coding system being used.

Well, I can give more context, but not sure if it will help in this case. Hope so. Still the color-code thing is understood, inspite it isn't in the context a present here...

Some marketing folks from Disney had come to share the promotion plans for the release of Toy Story 2, and Steve Jobs was squinting over the color-coded items of posters, trailers, billboards, release dates, promotions for the soundtrack album and for toys based on the movie’s characters, and so on. Steve was asking pointed, minute questions about the schedule for the television ads, events at Disneyland and Disney World, and which of the television news and interview shows the studio people would be aiming to line up. Steve, according to the article, was so “deeply into this” that he was “perusing the timeline like a rabbi studying Talmud.” The writer was clearly impressed. But for anybody who has ever worked with him, nothing about his questions was surprising. He is that detailed about everything.

When I was a child, my mother 'colour-coded' us for linen and toilet articles -- in the sense that, after she had changed the linen, or bought new toothbrushes, or whatever, I could walk into the bathroom and know that the blue towels, blue facecloth, blue toothbrush, blue etc, were all mine, and everything green belonged to my brother. (One sister, yellow; the other sister, pink.)

Decades later, I still don't buy green clothes because psychologically it's not "my" colour.
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Perfectly clear, Rival. Still I don't understand what does colour-coded items have to do with Toy Story poster, billboards an so on... Maybe it's just metaphorical in some sense I'm still aiming to discover...

Trosa said:

Perfectly clear, Rival. Still I don't understand what does colour-coded items have to do with Toy Story poster, billboards an so on... Maybe it's just metaphorical in some sense I'm still aiming to discover...

I don't think it's metaphorical - it is likely to be some way of systematizing the information. However, it is no longer a question of English that you are asking! Perhaps they were color coded by geographical region (US, Europe, ROW etc) by character, by phase of publicity campaign etc. The text doesn't help, and you know now what is meant by "color coded" so if you want to know the "system", you have some more research to do 👁 Big Grin :D