Category Archives: design

why I don’t like the colour wheel

design, knowledge, opinions/rants, , , , , , , , ,

There are many reasons why I don’t like colour wheels of the type shown below:

The first reason is because it perpetuates the myth that the subtractive primaries are red, yellow and blue whereas the fact is that red, yellow and blue produces a rather small gamut of colours. It is certainly not the best choice of subtractive primaries though it is taught as dogma in many art and design schools and throughout children’s education. The problem is that whenever two colours are mixed together there is saturation loss; that is, the resultant mixture ends up being more desaturated than the two components were. The saturation loss is greatest when mixing colours on the opposite side of the colour circle where the resultant mixture can be almost grey. However, for certain choices of primaries, the saturation loss is greater than for others. If red, yellow and blue are used as the primaries then of course it is possible to generate any other hue. However, there is significant saturation loss and the above colour wheel gives completely the wrong impression. It suggests that mixing blue and yellow together, for example, results in a really bright vivid green.

The reality of pigment mixing is much more like the triangular colour wheel shown below:

In the above diagram it can be seen that mixing together yellow and blue results in a really muddy dark green. The purple resulting from mixing blue and red is almost black!! Now it is possible to mix together a blue and a yellow to get a better green. For example, mixing a greenish blue with a yellow will give a much more vivid green. Mixing a bluish red with a greenish blue will result in a lovely purple. We have a name for a greenish blue and a blueish red – we call them cyan and magenta. A much better colour gamut is obtained if we start with the primaries, cyan, magenta and yellow.

Footnote: Some people may look at the triangular colour wheel and think that the reason the colours are dull is that the red, yellow, and blue primaries used are not ‘pure’ enough. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If it was possible to make really vivid and bright red and blue pigments then the resultant colour gamut would be even smaller. Fundamentally, red, yellow and blue just don’t make good subtractive primaries.

trademarking colour

design, news, , , ,

In the US a colour can only be successfully trademarked (protected) if the colour is used as a brand identifier. If the colour is used in a functional way then the courts do not usually award protection since to do so would be to unfairly suppress competition. Catrin Turner, an expert in trade mark law at law firm Pinsent Masons has said:

“Colour of packaging, for example from yellow or silver for butter, to purple or red for chocolate, create powerful connections for consumers. Having the colour monopoly granted by a registered trade mark creates real practical barriers for competitors wanting to sit within a class of products which consumers expect to be coloured a particular way.”

In my colour branding lectures at the University of Leeds I illustrate this with several high-profile examples such as Cadbury purple.

In 2008 the Federal Courts in USA dismissed a claim by Cadbury Schweppes that a competitor, Darrell Lea, had used purple on their chocolate packaging to pass their products off as Cadbury chocolate. One of the issues here is that purple is used functionally on chocolate packaging since it conveys richness and opulence. Indeed, Darrell Lea have been using the colour purple with their chocolate products since 1927. It is an obvious choice. It was a costly loss for cadbury; five years in court and undoubtedly millions of dollars in legal costs. However, the law in these matters is complex and varies from country to country. In November 2011 a UK court allowed Cadbury protection for their purple (Pantone 2685C) despite protests from Nestlé. In the UK a colour can be trade marked only if the company can show that the colour has acquired distinctive character through use. Interestingly, Cadbury were only granted protection for certain products (chocolate bars, for example) rather than being granted exclusive use of the colour for all of their products.

I was interested to read another fascinating case this week – Christian Louboutin’s red, used as a brand identifier on the soles of its women’s shoes. Louboutin registered its shade of red with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2008, and is now trying to prevent competitor Yves Saint Laurent from selling scarlet-soled shoes of its own. The fashion house says YSL’s copycat soles threaten to mislead the public. The district judge in the case ruled to deny Louboutin’s request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent YSL from selling the red-soled shoes from its 2011 collection, saying:

Because in the fashion industry color serves ornamental and aesthetic functions vital to robust competition, the court finds that Louboutin is unlikely to be able to prove that its red outsole brand is entitled to trademark protection, even if it has gained enough public recognition in the market to have acquired secondary meaning.

.

meaning of red

design, , , , , , ,

Today I found Karen Haller’s blog post on the meaning of red.

I liked the fact that she wrote about positive (warmth, excitement, energy) and negative (aggressive, confrontational) connotations of the colour. Karen argues that companies that use red as their primary colour are aggressive and energetic with a buzz about them. She gives examples of vodafone, coca cola, and virgin. Do you agree with her?

the colour of ergonomics

design, news, , , , , , , , ,

I just came across an article about Ford who think that the colour of the lighting in a car interior can affect driving alertness, giving drivers enhanced attention span, improving safety.

They say that a blue colour is best for alertness. I was intrigued by the statement:

The brain does not see color. What we call color of light is actually a form of electromagnetic energy with different wavelengths.

Seems to be by someone who thinks that colour is perceptual rather than physics – see my view on this.

They also say:

Certain levels or combinations of light trigger enzymes in the brain, which cause emotional responses within the body – states we recognize as stress, calmness or happiness – and can influence everything from your blood pressure to your buying decisions.

Interesting 🙂

How to self publish

design, opinions/rants, , , , , , , , ,

I spent the last week working out how to self publish my Colour Physics FAQ. This is not a post about colour but I thought it would be useful to document my experience; in case I forget 🙂 and in case it helps anyone else. It’s not rocket science but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought.

Perhaps the most important thing about publishing is to have content. You need to have something that at least one other person – though hopefully more, if it’s going to be worth the effort – will want to read. I am lucky – I have something called the Colour Physics FAQ which I have been writing since 1996 and which I know quite a lot of people like to read. Currently it is offline, looking for a new home, so I decided to look at various publishing routes to make it available again, to learn the ropes of self publishing for bigger projects in the future, and also to maybe earn a few squids in the process. Before I start, I should say that my content is in the form of a Microsoft Word document and I am working on a Mac. So that’s my starting point.

I started by looking at e-books. There are various platforms to choose from of course. I did some research and quickly realised Amazon Kindle would be a great place to start. Of course, I also considered Apple but I have read that the process with Apple is a lot more complicated and I can believe this after my experience a year or so ago of launching an app for the iPhone. So let me start by describing how I got my FAQ onto the Amazon Kindle platform.

The first thing you need to do is register on https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin. This is simple and painless. You need to create a new project and enter a name. For me, it was Frequently Asked Questions About Colour Physics. There are options to say whether the book is part of a series or has an edition number. None of this applied so I just left them blank. You need to add a description. This is what people see in the Kindle store. For my project I wrote:

What is colour? How does colour vision work? Why is the sky blue? What is the colour spectrum? The answers to these and many other related questions about colour physics are each provided in a short and easy-to-understand form. Will delight and entertain colour professionals and curious members of the public.

What is additive colour mixing?

Additive colour mixing refers to the mixing of different (coloured) lights and can be easily demonstrated by the superposition of lights (known as primaries) on a white projection screen. When this is done using red, green, and blue primaries, the colours yellow, cyan, and magenta are produced where two of the primaries overlap. Where all three primaries overlap the sensation of white is produced if the spectral distributions and intensities of the three primaries are carefully chosen.

Additivity is not a special property of any particular set of three primaries. The range of colours that can be matched with any three primaries is called the gamut of those primaries.

One often reads that the primaries are pure and cannot be matched from other colours. This is not true. If one uses three primaries such as red, green and blue it is true that none of the primaries can be matched by mixtures of the other two or by mixtures of any other colours in the gamut of the primary system. However, one could select colours outside the gamut of the system which when mixed together could match the primaries.

It turns out that no three real primaries can be chosen so that their gamut includes all possible colours. If the primaries are chosen to be red, green, and blue, however, a very large number of colours can be matched. Red, green, and blue are therefore usually the colours of the primaries in an additive colour reproduction system such as colour television.

You then have to say who the author is, what the publication date is, and, if you have one, what the ISBN number is. I didn’t bother with an ISBN number for the ebook (but more on ISBN numbers later). You also need to say who your target audience is. For this you have to choose from certain categories – I selected Textiles & Polymer and Color Theory. The book addresses colour physics mainly from a textile perspective so the first category seemed a good idea. You then have to verify that you own the publishing rights to the content and upload a cover. (There is an option not to upload a book cover if your main file already contains one.) For my cover I created a png file that I designed myself. You can see it on this page, if you are interested.

The final step in this part is to upload your document. Actually, the Amazon Kindle site recommends that you use WORD to write the document and then convert it to Web Page, Filtered (*HTM & *HTML) format. I didn’t do this and I think it may have been a mistake. I decided to create an epub document and upload this. To create the epub document I downloaded some free somewhere called Calibre. Downloading and using calibre was quite easy. You need to save your WORD file as an rtf file, add it to Calibre, and then convert it to epub. I did this and uploaded the file. It seemed to work just fine. However, I am not entirely convinced I have everything right. In the next week I may have a go at uploading the format recommended by Amazon Kindle. I can’t be sure how my ebook looks because I don’t have a kindle. But I know I have made some mistakes here (something I am prone to because I am too impetuous). I am pretty sure my greek symbols are not displaying properly and I don’t know if I have an active table of contents. Even if I do, the page numbers I used in my automatically created TOCs in WORD are meaningless. The kindle allows the user to change font size and so the page numbers are not relevant at all. Ebooks flow much more fluidly as documents than do, say, physical books. There is a previewer that allows you to get a good idea of how your ebook will look on a Kindle; this is why I don’t think my table of contents are working well. I didn’t use any images in this ebook. There are some issues with using images because many ebook devices do not support colour images yet. I would recommend anyone else to read this help page before deciding how to format their ebook for the Amazon Kindle.

Having uploaded your book you then have to select pricing etc. The first step is to confirm you want Worldwide rights – seemed like a good idea so I selected this option. Then you need to set the price. You can choose a 70% royalty or a 30% royalty. You can only choose the 70% level if your book is less than $10. I chose this option and set the price to $5.99. Prices for UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain were set automatically based on my dollar price (you can over-ride this).

There are a couple of other options. One is to allow Kindle lending – this means that someone who has bought the book can can transfer it to a friend’s kindle for a short time (14 days, I think, during which time they cannot access it themselves). I decided to allow Kindle lending. It would be mean not to. There is also an option for KDP Select. I didn’t fully understand what this was about – I am still confused – and so I did not choose this option.

You also have to give your bank account details to allow you to be paid. You can choose the currency to be paid in. I chose UK pounds for all of the sites that allowed this – the US site did not allow it. You have to be paid in dollars by amazon usa and you need a dollar account for this. I don’t have one so opted to be paid by cheque (they will send me a cheque if my royalties trigger the $100 threshold for a cheque). There is no mention of tax so I don’t know how that is going to work.

Finally you click submit and you have the guys at amazon look over your files and come back and say everything is ok. This takes about 10 hours. The men from del monte said everything was fine and I was live! After that I made a small change to the price (having had second thoughts) and that took another 10 hours (but I think the first submission stayed live whilst the changes took time to take effect), and then I made a small change to the book file itself and that took another 10 hours. Part of the reason I had to do this was I was learning as I went along (that was my aim, of course). For my next project, now that I know all the required steps, I can work out everything that I need to before I start the upload process.

That was it. Not too painful at all and the upload webpage guides you through quite well. I am not entirely satisfied with what I have produced but it is live and you can see the final project here.

I took a day or so off, and then decided I would like to explore making the Colour Physics FAQ available as a physical book. For this I have used CreateSpace. You need to create an account. One of the nice things about this process is that CreateSpace creates an ISBN number for you. In my case it was

ISBN-13: 978-1470101534
ISBN-10: 147010153X

You can provide your own ISBN if you have one but this seemed to be the easiest option for me. Once set though, the ISBN is locked. It cannot be changed. The preferred format to upload your content (which they refer to as interior) is pdf which suits me quite fine. However, they provide WORD templates for the book size you select. I chose 6″ by 9″ (which they said was the most popular option – so why argue?) and downloaded the template. This was a little frustrating as anyone who has ever worked with a WORD template will know. But probably would not have been anywhere near as difficult had I not been simultaneously trying to look after my little boy (three years old). I created the pdf and uploaded it.

You then have to provide a cover. Again, you can do this yourself and upload a pdf file if you wish or you can use their cover design software. I decided to do the latter and within 10 minutes I had produced this:

I then had to set pricing. I chose $11.99 for my book. The royalty per book was automatically calculated as $5.04 from Amazon and $7.44 from CreateSpace eStore. I don’t know why they are different but urge you to choose to buy from CreateSpace eStore if you were thinking of buying it. Distribution to Amazon and CreateSpace eStore is free (essentially because it is print on demand there I think). However, you can pay to have the book available to bookstores, other on-line outlets, and university libraries. It seems to be a one-off cost of $25. I did not explore it. I will be interested in this for more substantial projects I plan in the future. But for now, I am happy with the standard distribution channels.

It seems like the only option to be paid is by cheque (for which there is an $8 fee – of course). I don’t have a dollar account. But there is even worse news. Amazon will deduct 30% tax. I don’t know if the royalties quoted above are before this deduction or after it. Either way, it is apparent I am not going to become a millionaire from this project. I can stop the 30% tax being deducted. But I have to get something called a TIN (US Tax Identification Number) which I do by filling in IRS Form SS-4. I downloaded this form. It looks horrific and when I have completed it (if I ever do) I need to send it by snail mail to the IRS in America and then wait …. I guess this is done once though, that is, for each person rather than for each project. So it probably is worth doing in the long run if I am planning further publications, which I am.

So that’s it. My CreateSpace book is currently in review and I expect it to go live later today.

The Incredible Grey Hulk

culture, design, technology, , , , , , , , , , , ,

When I was young I used to read Marvel comics. My favourites were Spiderman and The Fantastic Four but I also liked the Hulk and Thor. When I was about 10 (in about 1972) I even had this idea of designing a wrist band that could shoot out web like spiderman. What I needed was a substance that would flow (as a liquid) when it was shot out but then quickly solidified to create the web. I noticed that polystyrene turned liquid under heat and I started to build a prototype. Sadly it never worked. But I often wonder if this incident sparked my interest in chemistry, an interest that led me to study Colour Chemistry at Leeds University in 1983 and finally to my lifelong passion for colour.

I just came across a story that the Hulk was not green in the original comic strip versions. He was grey!! Apparently, in The Hulk’s debut (May 1962, a few days after I was born) Lee chose grey for the Hulk because he wanted a colour that did not suggest any particular ethnic group. The chap in charge of the colour, Stan Goldberg, however, had problems with the grey; colour management was not what it is now and this resulted in several different shades of grey, and even green, in the first issue! Given the colour problems, Lee chose to change the skin colour to green. What a shocker! Next, I’ll probably find out that Spiderman was not real!!

taxi colours

culture, design, news, , , , ,

In 2009 I blogged about a big row in Derby (UK) about yellow taxis. Most taxis in UK cities are black (in most other cities they are yellow). In 2009 Derby decided that their official taxis should be yellow.However, they didn’t specify exactly which yellow and they ended up in a bit of a mess with a taxi driver that they said had used the wrong shade of yellow. Good business for lawyers!

Then in 2011 I blogged about a major row in Durham (UK) where, again, there was a similarly heated row about the local council wanting to adopt white taxis in the city. It seems to be a topic that people get quite emotive about. So I wonder if there will be similar argument in Kolkata (West Bengal) where the government wants to change the taxi colours from yellow to blue and white. See here for the story.

I guess I sound like a bit of a sad geek, writing about taxi colours. Have I nothing better to do on a Sunday morning? The answer is obvious no. 🙂

But if you have read this far you might be interested in Beijing (China). Beijing is not known for its good taxis. But about 6 years ago the authority of Beijing city unified the colours to make them easier to recognise. The body of taxi is fixed to be 3-stripes-2-colors. The middle stripe is a golden yellow color while the rest of the body in another color which are commonly blue, green or red. When I was last in Beijing someone told me that the colours had special meanings but I am not sure it is true. I am going to consult my colour guru who works at Tsinghua University in Beijing and will add a comment later.

traffic lights for everyone

design, news, , , , , , , , , ,

About 8% of men are colour blind. In the past I have written about how designers may not adequately take this into account effectively ignoring 4% of the population. I also wrote about how in Korea the problem of traffic lights for colour blind people was being addressed by using different shapes for the different colours.

Now I am interested to hear about a development from Japan – Professor Ochiai at Kyushu Sangyo University has developed a clever modification that is not noticed by people with normal colour vision but helps those who are colour blind. Before the introduction of LED lights people often could tell red from green by the difference in brightness. But LED lights are so bright that they look rather similar in brightness, and for someone with red-green colour blindness they may look identical. Professor Ochiai has added a blue cross to the red light which is very visible to colour-blind observers but can hardly be noticed by the rest of us. Very clever!!

The new lights are being tested in Fukuoka and are due to go on test in Tokyo soon.