Everyone who works in colour has heard of Pantone. The Pantone Matching System has been used for decades for colour specification and colour communication. This month Pantone have unveiled a new system – Pantone Plus. Apparently, Pantone Plus provides users with expanded colour sets and more intuitive selection method to help streamline the creative process. I look forward to seeing it.
I have been thinking of attending a meeting of the Color Marketing Group which is to be held in Amsterdam on 26-28th May 2010. Amsterdam is only about 45 mins by plane from Leeds so if I can get a flight I will go. It looks a really good event. For further details see www.colormarketing.org
Cricket authorities have been experimenting with pink cricket balls. A cricket match in Abu Dhabi used new pink cricket balls for a game that took place under floodlights.
The argument is that the traditional red ball used in cricket, being of a relatively deep shade is hard to see under night conditions even with floodlights. The recent experiments seem to have been a success. John Stephenson, Head of Cricket at MCC (the world’s most famous cricket club), said “We have proved that the pink ball is clearly visible in day or night conditions and that day/night first-class cricket is a viable option for cricket administrators. Certainly the pink ball itself could be improved – such as by darkening the seam so batsmen can pick up the spinning delivery – but I don’t see an insurmountable block to progress.”
It’s not a view necessarily shared by the ICC though. The ICC is the International Cricket Council. “The MCC has been great in initiating trials around the world, but before we look at these projects we need to establish up front, from a scientific point of view, what makes sense,” said Dave Richardson, the ICC’s general manager of cricket. “The balls that have been developed so far are still a long way off being able to last 80 overs,” he added. “They just get too dirty. The beauty of the red ball is that it keeps its colour even when it’s old.”
The ball shown below is a pink ball after 14 overs (that’s 96 deliveries for the non-cricket-aware colour lovers).
For further information see – http://tinyurl.com/yhak2g5
A pink ball was used for the first time in a match in England on 21 April 2008 in a match between an MCC XI and Scotland. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/7352516.stm
Consider the image below:
The four grey patches in the centre of the four squares are phsyically the same. If seen in isolation (or against a common background) they would look the same. So are the grey colours the same or different?
Some people would argue the two greys are really different (this is convincing because after all they look different). However, others would argue that they are the same colour – it’s just an illusion that they look different because of the background and context. Which is right? Actually, I think both are correct. The former would be talking about perceptual colour and the latter would be talking about physical colour. Part of the reason that colour is so complex and that there seem to be so many ideas that clash is that colour is not very well defined. When people talk about colour they are sometimes talking about different things. I am wondering whether it would be really helpful to develop more formally the ideas of physical and perceptual colour.
In case on your screen the greys look more similar that they do on my screen I append another example of colour contrast below. 
In this example, there are only two physical colours (red and green) or three (if you include white). However, perceptually there are two reds and two greens.
The impressionists understood about colour contrast. If you put a colour patch on a coloured background the colour of the patch will usually change (compared to if, for example, the patch was observed on a chromatically neutral background). The colour of the patch tends to move towards the complementary colour of the background. If the background is the complementary colour of the patch then the patch becomes particularly vivid.
In Van Gogh’s cafe and night cafe paintings you can see the juxtaposition of yellow and blue and red and green. Today I came across a more contemporary application of colour theory – eye make-up!
DoWop have produced something called EyeCatcher Shadows where the colour that is applied to the eyelid is the complementary colour of the iris. To see more visit – http://www.asos.com/Duwop/Duwop-Eyecatcher-Shadows/Prod/pgeproduct.aspx?iid=1047107
Much was made in the media this week about the front bench of the labour party (UK) all wearing purple during the announcement of the budget. However, remarkable though it was, it is not a totally new phenomenon. On a number of occasions in 2009 and even 2008 leading figures in the government have been seen wearing purple.
In fact, even in December 2008 Zoe Williams was writing about this in the Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/08/fashion-ties-purple-gordon-brown. Zoe points out that the latest trend for wearing purple by politicians was probably started by Michelle Obama who famously wore the colour in August 2008.
Perhaps the labour politicians believe that purple represesnts a third way, halfway between red and blue (the colours traditionally associated with the left and right of UK politics respectively). Or perhaps they feel that it gives the impression of power and establishes them as the rightful winners of the forthcoming election. Purple was the colour worn by emperors and senators of course. Whatever the rationale, it is surely not a coincidence.
Can you own a colour?
The answer is almost certainly not. However, the law on colour use in branding and marketing is complex and there have been several high profile cases of companies slugging it out over the use of colour. I have previously posted about the dispute between Google and Microsoft – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/four-colour-primaries/.
There are two other high profile cases I know of. One is the objection by Orange (a British Telecoms company) to the use of the colour orange by Easy Jet – http://tinyurl.com/y8la766. The other is the dispute between chocolate manufacturers over the use of the colour purple in chocolate wrappers – http://tinyurl.com/y9cgyum.
However, in a paper published in the open access colour journal – Colour: Design and Creativity – Paul Green-Armytage argues that the key to many of these disputes about colour ownership lies in the definitions of colour. See http://www.colour-journal.org/2009/4/6/index.htm to read Paul’s full article.
Dollar General (http://www.dollargeneral.com) is a discount store based in the USA. They used distinctive yellow and black colour combinations in their advertising material. In March this year they filed a lawsuit against their competitor (Fred’s Inc) who they claim have damaged their business by copying the trademark yellow and black colours in certain marketing information.
The lawsuit accuses Fred’s of “unlawfully and deceptively” using Dollar General’s colour scheme and typeface in a new advertising campaign. The lawsuit says the only explanation for Fred’s moving away from a traditional blue-green color combination in its advertising is an intent to capture Dollar General’s brand awareness.
For further information see http://nashville.bizjournals.com/nashville/stories/2010/03/08/daily27.html
We normally think of there being three colour primaries. There is no one set of primaries of course. If we think of additive colour mixing the primaries are red, green and blue. But which red, green and blue? There are almost as many sets of RGB primaries as I have had hot dinners. And I like hot dinners.
In subtractive mixing we sometimes read that red, yellow and blue are primaries; though we know now that RYB results in a rather small colour gamut and is not a great choice of primaries. Techies may know that the optimum subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow and, indeed, CMY are the primaries used in most desktop printers (though, again, there is no one set that everyone uses).
However, there is a sense in which there are four colour primaries: these being, red, green, yellow and blue. These are the so-called psychological primaries. Whereas the other sets of primaries I mentioned relate to technology – the technology of colour mixing – the psychological primaries relate to our phemenological experience of colour more directly. Red, green, yellow and blue are opponent colours – red is opposite green and blue is opposite yellow as first formally descibed by the physiologist Ewald Hering in the late 1800s. We can think of a colour as being a mixture of red and yellow (i.e. orange) or red and blue (i.e. purple) but we cannot conceive of a colour that is a mixture of red and green. We don’t see red and green at the same time in the same colour. Furthermore, these four colours are the unitary or unique hues. Though one can see reds that are bluish and reds that are yellowish, there is red that if you saw it you would say it is a pure red, neither bluish nor yellowish. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is remarkable agreement between different people as to the exact unique colours. For example, if people are shown a spectrum of different wavelengths and asked to pick the green that is pure (without bias) they will also select almost the same wavelength. Orange is not unique in the same way – though some oranges are reddish and some are more yellowish, every orange looks like a mixture of red and yellow. Orange cannot therefore said to be a unqiue hue.
There is a particular power and salience about the four colours red, green, yellow and blue and therefore it is no surprise to find these colours used frequently in advertsing and design. Most spectacularly, they are all used at the same time in two of the most famous logos in the world.
Curiously, Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the google logo was quoted in Wired magazine in 2008 as saying, “There were a lot of different color iterations. We ended up with the primary colors, but instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn’t follow the rules.” It seems more likely, however, that the Microsoft logo is based on a clearer understanding of the relationship between the four psychological primaries. Though I have yet to find reliable information about the Microsoft logo so please add some details if anyone knows by making a comment.
There currently seems to be a lawsuit between Microsoft and Google regarding the use of colour in these logos. For further information goto http://colormatters.blogspot.com/2009/07/color-infringement-microsoft-vs-google.html.
For several decades there has been a great interest in understanding how we use colour names. Do we use the same colour categories (even though they may be called different things in different languages) irrespective of language and culture; in other words, is our perception of colour the same across all cultures and this shapes our use of colour names? Or, is our perception of colour shaped by our language. A well-known study by Berlin and Kay in the late 1960s suggested that language is shaped by perception. But the alterantive hypothesis – known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that perception is shaped by language also has support. We may soon know more about this issue because of an interesting on-line colour experiment being carried out by a scientist at Hewlatt-Packard. California-based Nathan Moroney’s multi-lingual colour-naming experiment uses a clever design that allows each participant to perform a small part of the experiment; but when lots of people take part – from all parts of the world and using different languages – some interesting and valuable data is collected. I won’t say any more about the work here because it is not complete yet; but I urge you to go and take part in the experiment. It only takes a minute or less to do it. And there is a debriefing document that you can read about the results obtained so far. Please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/mlcn.html.
Meanwhile a study by Skirinko (at the University of Virginia) and colleagues at Rice University reveals that the colour names that companies such for their products can have a big effect on sales. Consumer reactions are more positive to fancy names such as mocha as opposed to simple and generic names such as brown. The explanation for this is based on categorical perception; people use categories and a name such a mocha maps to a more positive cataegory than the simpler brown. So it is perhaps not jsut the colour of a product that affects sales; sales may also be affected by the langauage used to describe the colours of products.
The work by Skirinko et al. was published in Psychology and Marketing in 2006.
