Recently I had the idea of trying to teach the basics of colour theory using Instagram.
The idea is to keep the messages really clear and simple and combine them with colourful imagery.
You can see this on my Instagram account @colourchat.
I was inspired to do this after watching what GothamChess was doing on Instagram to teach some simple – and not so simple – ideas about chess. Who would have thought it? From chess theory to colour theory.
2020 was a depressing year in many ways for obvious reasons. However, I was still really proud of the four PhD students who graduated with me during this year.
Keith Findlater graduated with a PhD in high-dynamic range imaging, Sarah Hasbullah graduated with a PhD in colour for colour in fashion and body image, Jing Lin graduated with a PhD in the effect of coloured light on alertness and Jie Yang graduated with a PhD in colour and landscape images. It’s always exciting to see where graduated students go next. I already know that Sarah and Jie have academic positions and Keith has got a great job in medical imaging in the NHS.
You can see find publications from these students and others at my personal page at http://stephenwestland.co.uk/
We had a lot of fun with our third colour podcast. We started off talking about the colour vision of unicorns and my co-presenter Huw put forward a very entertaining suggestion of what their colour vision would be like if they existed. We then explored the effect of colour and light on health. The effect of colour on heart rate and blood pressure is still contentious which is extraordinary, I think after all of these years that the scientific community has been studying colour. We also spoke about the role of colour and light on sleep. Sleep is really really important. Watching this TED talk by Matthew Walker about sleep might be the most important thing that you watch this year.
In our second colour podcast we chat about how long human colour vision has been the way it has. When did we first colour? How long have we even been human?
Our first colour podcast was all about animal colour vision. Can dogs see colour? Are bulls enraged by the colour red? Can they even see it? And which animals have even better colour vision than we do. You can list to this short podcast here.
I am really excited to be part of the team of people who just launched the Colour Literacy Project – for further details see https://colourliteracy.org/
I started teaching my own multi-disciplinary approach to colour at Leeds University in about 2005 as I became frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory was being taught and how it was often presented in textbooks. Over the last few years I have discovered I am not alone. I found out that Luanne Stovall (https://www.luannestovall.com/) and Robin Kingsburgh (http://robinkingsburgh.com/colour-literacy-project) were doing something similar in their universities. And it was a pleasure to come across the fantastic resources of David Briggs for whom I have the highest regard – you can see his brilliant resource here – http://www.huevaluechroma.com/. I first became introduced to these people through Maggie Maggio (https://maggiemaggio.com/color/) who came to Leeds a year or so away and gave a brilliant and inspiring colour workshop. So it turns out that I am not the only one who is frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory is often presented and taught. However, with the Colour Literacy Project – supported by both ISCC (https://iscc.org/) and AIC (https://aic-color.org/) – we hope to change the way the world views colour in the 21st Century one step at a time. You can get involved to by visiting the Colour Literacy Project website.
About 80 years ago the Milkybar was introduced by Nestlé. Since then, chocolate has broadly speaking been one of three colours: dark, milk and white. Today I read that a new colour of chocolate has been developed which is claimed to be the first new natural colour of chocolate since Nestlé’s innovation. The beans are grown in Ivory Coast, Ecuador and Brazil and the new chocolate, which is being referred to as ruby chocolate, has been underdevelopment for just under a decade. Apparently this new chocolate has a natural pinkish colour and a berry flavour. I suspect the manufacturers are choosing to call it ruby chocolate rather than pink chocolate because the latter sounds childish; they probably want to market this new chocolate in the upper price brackets and emphasize that its colour is natural (there are plenty of pink children’s sweets out there that are full of artificial colorants).
There is still time to submit an abstract for AIC2017 which will be held this autumn in Jeju island in South Korea. It’s probably the largest colour conference of the year and every four years they have an especially large one called the congress. We hosted the last congress in UK but this time it is the turn of South Korea. If you can attend this conference I highly recommend it as a way to meet all sorts of interesting and colourful people.
The top three favourite car colours in the UK in 2016 were white, black and grey (in that order). White has been the best seeing colour for four years which is interesting because it never used to be popular in the UK. Car salesman used to refer to the colour as three-week white because it took three weeks longer to sell a white car compared with other colours. But it’s 10 years now since a chromatic colour was number 1.
For further details see here.
I believe that print as we know it is dead. I know that there are some arguing that print is having a resurgence – just as there are those who think that vinyl is on the way back for music – but reports that physical books are gaining ground at the expense of digital are just plain wrong as is explained in this article. I saw this before with digital images where people argued that digital images would never replace traditional photography because of quality and price. Well, of course, we know that the quality of digital images increased and the cost of getting them decreased (when I was a student in the 80s it would have been bizarre to imagine that everyone would have a couple of cameras on them at all times) – but it was not this that killed traditional photography and eventually put the giant Kodak out of business. What killed traditional photography was when you could go to a gig, take a photo, and share it almost instantly with your friends around the world. Traditional photography could never compete with this.
Some people prefer reading print to looking at a screen though I am not one of them. But imagine when an e-document feels like paper, is light and flexible, but you can carry a whole newspaper with you (not to mention all the novels you have ever read) by carrying just one piece of it. And it looks just like print.
E ink, the company behind the pigment-based, low-energy monochromatic displays found in many of today’s popular readers has worked out how to create up to 32,000 colours using almost the same technology. For the first time they can create colours at each pixel using yellow, cyan, magenta and white pigments. The new display is 20-inch with 2500 x 1600 resolution. The image below is rendered in this way. This leads to the possibility of having coloured moving images made out of ink – just like the Daily Prophet in the Harry Potter movies. Well, not quite like that yet. But it’s coming. More details here.
