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Colourchat on youtube

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During my recent travels (Thailand for AIC; and China) i was thinking about podcasts and youtube etc. and I had an idea for creating a series of youtube videos about colour. What I didn’t want to do was create a powerpoint presentation and speak over it. I think we are all bored with that aren’t we.

But inspired by a youtuber who was posting about medieval England I had the the idea of just speaking to camera. No fancy graphic or slick production. Just speak to the camera about a number of colour-related topics that I find interesting. At the end of the day it is about colour and so I do include a couple of images and graphics – after all, a picture paints a thousand words – but I try to keep these to a minimum.

I recorded the first of these two of these videos from my hotel in Thailand (which was a brilliant venue by the way – congratulations to the Colour Society of Thailand for their brilliant organisation. You can view this introductory video here.

I also recorded the second video in Thailand and the third one in China. The concept os that I will try to answers questions about colour. These are questions that the public has been asking me for the last 40 years. The first question I decided to answer was Where is colour?

It turned out that this is a very complicated question of course and I decided to address it in two parts. You can listen to these two parts here and here.

It’s an experiment I am conducting. Way back when the internet was barely functional (late 80s / early 90s) I posted to the internet something called the Colour Physics FAQ which was a list of questions and answers about colour.

Eventually, FAQs became old hat I stopped supporting it online though I made it available on Amazon as a small e-book for old times’ sake.

My Colourchat blog has been another way to speak with people about colour and has been reasonably successful. In 2021 I had nearly 100,000 visitors to the blog. But of late I have been less convinced that a blog can really get to people. So my youtube videos can be seen as another experiment in a long-line of experiments – some more successful than others – where I get to talk to people about colour. Let’s see how it does.

MSc Colour

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I am really excited to announce a new Masters programme at University of Leeds in the School of Design.

MSc Colour is a postgraduate qualification that is launching in 2024. There are two unique aspects to the programme.

Firstly, it is inherently multidisciplinary. Colour is a natural meta-discipline and to study well it is important to have an open mind and to be prepared to stretch yourself beyond your natural academic area. We will recruit students from all disciplines: art, design, chemistry, computing etc. In the first semester all students will have to undertake some colour design, some colour material science and some colour imaging technology. This multidisciplinary approach is to key to our thinking. However, in the second semester students will specialise in one of three areas:

  • Colour Design
  • Colour Materials
  • Colour Imaging

Secondly, our programme is aligned with the Colour Literacy Project. The CLP, supported by the AIC and the ISSC, is an educational initiative to strengthen the bridge between art and science in 21st century colour education, while addressing common misconceptions and misinformation about colour. The primary objective of the project is to develop a colour education website, within a STEAM framework, which provides foundational, state-of-the-art resources on the art, science and industry of colour for teachers at all education levels. We will be paying particular attention to the common misconceptions about colour which can be found in some educational material.

I will be the Programme Leader for this new programme. For the last few years I have been teaching colour as part of MA Design at Leeds but I am super excited about being involved in a programme where the focus is colour. We have a really talented team of academics with wide experience and can’t wait until next September.

For further information visit here.

Free Webinar on Colour Design and AI

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We have a free webinar tomorrow (Thurs 23 Feb at 2pm UK time) about colour and AI. Anat Lechner will present about this topic. Here is the abstract below:

We’re at a new age where artificial intelligence is becoming the most influential technology, a technology that once arrived, is poised to morph all aspects of our lives, irreversibly.

Artificial Intelligence rapidly moves into the mainstream, demonstrating greater production efficiencies, marketing precision and at times, creative design output than what humans generate. As cross-industry disruption escalates, designing products, brands and environments is being challenged. Traditionally, design decisions relied heavily on personal preference, past experience, anecdotal or company data, or costly market research, but advancements in big-data and AI call for the integration of new capabilities into the design process to better inform, inspire and validate design decisions

This seminar will review the emergent cross-industry AI-driven disruption, providing examples of creative cognitive technology applications in product, brand, urban and experience designs. We will then center on data-driven color design decision processes, discussing new colour data insights and tools to enhance and solidify companies’ creative capabilities, data assets, design practices, and talent bench-strength.

Anat Lechner, PhD, is a Professor of Business at the Stern School of Business, New York University where she focuses on disruptive innovation and strategic change. She is also the co-founder of Huedata Inc., the Color Intelligence Company that provides colour data and analytics to designers, strategists and researchers to aid product, brand and environment design decisions. A former Researcher at McKinsey & Co. Dr. Lechner has advised global Fortune 100 firms in the Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Energy, Food, Technology, design and Retail industries. She has numerous appearances in NYT, WSJ, Forbes, BBC, Time and other premier global media outlets. Anat holds an MBA and a PhD in Organization Management from Rutgers University, NJ.

The webinar is free but you need to enrol. You can do that here – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/colour-design-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence-tickets-537415603537