Monthly Archives: August 2014

guess what – red is sexy

red is sexy
Guess what? Another article that concludes that women wearing red are more likely to attract a mate. Scientist claims women are reflecting their sexual intentions ‘from the beginning’ by wearing bright red clothing. It’s a shocker!!! Who would have thought it!

It must be true because I read it in the Daily Mail.

Colour and Manchester United

van gaal

It’s not often I get to write about two of my favourite things at the same time. So I couldn’t resist remarking on a story today in the Daily Mirror about a colour code that Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal uses to describe different players in his squad. Apparently:

Blue:
“A blue player is intellectual and is always looking for structure and security in his job on the pitch.”

Red:
“A red player is creative, full of power, will want to work and is always focusing on the future.”

Green:
“A green player is very emotional, sensitive for different emotions or a different atmosphere in the squad.”

See the original article for the colours that the newspaper thinks that different players should be be allocated.

It couldn’t get much blacker

black
A few weeks ago I was taking my son to a birthday party and a journalist from The Independent phoned me to ask my opinion on Vantablack. This is the blackest material ever made. Whereas most black materials reflect about 4% of the light (or more) at all wavelengths, this new nano-material has really really low reflectance. It only reflects about 0.035% of the light. I gave a few comments and an article appeared in The Independent which was nice. I used to really like The Independent, back in the days when I read newspapers. The original article by Ian Johnston was very good imho.

However, a few days later the story was all around the world and I was often cited, all based on that one phone interview with Ian. The thing was that it was not even that big news. That is, yes, it is the blackest material ever made, but the truth is it is an incremental improvement in blackness beating the previous blackest material from a few years ago. My name even appeared in the Daily Mail. Most embarrassingly, I was interviewed on an American radio show. The reason I say it was embarrassing was that this new development actually had nothing to do with me and I didn’t want people thinking I was trying to claim credit. So when I agreed to do the radio show I told the researcher that they needed to be clear that this was nothing to do with me. I didn’t invent it. Imagine my surprise when John Hockenberry (that was his name, I believe) asked me, “So Dr Westland, what have you stumbled upon?”. Arghhhhh!!! Luckily, it was not a live interview because it actually got worse. A lot worse. So bad, that I could barely summon up strength to listen to it when it went out the next day. But actually, the editors did a good job and the final cut is not too bad. You can hear it here.

It would be nice to talk about my own work. I work in the area of blackness. One of the things I do is to ask people to rank different black samples in order of least black to most black. This allows me to discover, for example, that women prefer reddish blacks and men prefer bluish blacks. Also, asians prefer reddish blacks and caucasians prefer bluish blacks. I am developing a blackness index; a way to measure a sample and say how black it is or whether one sample is blacker than another. Why? Well, one application is for manufacturers of black ink for printers (which may be made from coloured inks). Different recipes produce different blacks. What if one recipe is chromatically neutral but another recipe is less neural (it has a slight hue) but is darker – which one is blacker?

black plants can save the world

leaves
About three years ago I posted about the question of why leaves are green. In this I postulated as to why chlorophyll (the green stuff in leaves) should be green; after all, this means that it only absorbing some of the wavelengths in the visible spectrum. In fact, I argued that it would be better if plants were black, absorbing all of the wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Now, someone on co.design is suggesting just that – that green plants absorb only about 2% of the possible energy and that scientists are thinking of turning them black. Presumably this would save the world because plants would be more efficient at converting harmful greenhouse gasses into oxygen. There’s catch though, apparently. If you make the plants black they get too hot and overheat resulting in cell damage. Actually, I also suggested this might be the case in my original article in 2011. Looks like black plants won’t save the world. They won’t even save themselves.

There’s nothing wrong with black carrots though – see here.

colour and branding

mcdonalds

According to Jon Feagain colour affects brand development in five ways:

    It helps boost perception

    It attracts attention

    It can help to emphasise or conceal information

    It can help you appeal to the right audience

    It can can help the audience digest information better

I think all of these things are true. However, to make the right decisions a good understanding of colour semiotics is critical in my opinion. Achieving that is easier said than done.

Structural colours

butterfly

Most colours around result from light being absorbed (electronic transitions) and scattered by dyes and/or pigments. However, there was an interesting article in The Guardian today about structural colour. Structural colour is quite common in nature; it occurs when light is scattered because of a regularity in packing or structure; the wavelength of the light that is most strongly scattered is determined by the repeat distance of this packing, which has to be comparable to the wavelength of the light.