On the lines and colors blog about drawing I came across a post about the work of dutch artist Femke Hiemstra – http://www.linesandcolors.com/2011/08/21/femke-hiemstra/. Her anthropomorphised animals and fantasy landscapes remind me of Alice in Wonderland. What do you think?
I was interested to come across Color Outlook today – http://coloroutlook.com/ – a website that offers advice on colour trends. They offer quarterly 60-minute long podcasts that contain advice and knowledge from a consortium of colour experts. I can’t comment on what is in the podcasts because unfortunately they are not free 🙂 However, the credentials of the experts seem impressive indeed; from interior designers, through architectural consultants and artists, to colour psychologists. Lori Sawaya is the name that I am most familiar with. I don’t know her well but she seems a friendly and genuine person.
Though the podcasts are not free, there is a free podcast on the history of colour forecasting and trends so I am going to see if I can get that and have a listen. I will let you know what I think.
Not sure what to say about this but I really like this picture. A scientist in India has experimented with ants whose transparent abdomens show the colour they have eating. He noticed they went white after drinking milk and then gave them sugar solutions coloured with different dyes. Apparently fond that ants preferred yellow and green solutions – perhaps these are better associated with sweetness. For the full story and some more great pictures see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2022765/The-ants-multi-coloured-abdomens-exactly-theyve-eating.html
Many studies have been carried out over the last century or so on colour preferences. These generally reveal some quite remarkable consistencies. For example, although there are individual differences, on average people tend to like cooler colours (blues and greens) more so than warmer colours. I have been conducting my own – just for fun – survey on these pages (see http://colourware.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/favourite-colour-poll/) for the last few months: I asked people which colour they would prefer out of green, brown, yellow, orange, black, red, pink, purple, white, grey, blue and other. So far 45% of respondents have selected blue or green.
Whether gender or cultural affect colour preferences is more controversial although many studies have indicated that they may. The most significant work I know of in this regard is that published in Current Biology (2007) by a team lead by Anya Hurlbert of Newcastle University that adds substantial weight to the idea that there are statistically significant differences in colour preferences between males and females. Hurlbert’s team found that females prefer redder blues (tending towards pinks and red) than males. It is also suggested that the gender differences result from biological rather than cultural factors. Perhaps evolution favoured females who were better able to discriminate between ripe and unripe fruit or who could better discriminate between colours of faces.
If you are interested in this you may like to take part in a new global colour survey being carried out by one of my PhD students. You can see the survey here – https://www.keysurvey.co.uk/survey/365495/1a02/
I once read that 20th Century research indicated that most people dream in black and white but that modern research reveals that most people dream in colour. The difference is attributed to the fact that in the early 20th century the majority of people spent a long time looking at black and white media. I came across this idea again in The Times today. Sadly, I can’t link to the story because The Times Online is no longer free. Boooo. In fact, I read this in The Review section of The Times today (paper version – I am too mean to pay for the online version). The article stated that a Japanese study published this month by the American Psychological Association found that most people in their sixties dreamt in black and white while the majority of university students (the implication being, I suppose, that these represent a much younger subset of the population) dreamt in rich colour (rich colour – not just colour!). The researchers suggest that younger participants had grown up watching colour TV. However, a psychologist – Ian Wallace – was quoted as saying that he thought this explanation was unlikely sine television represents a tiny part of the visual field and old viewers would have spent far less time watching television that we do today. In fact, the main article was about REM and about how having too much deep REM sleep where we dream could be associated with depression. Anyway, I think it must be very difficult to actually know whether people dream in colour – you could ask them when they wake up, but remembering could, of course, be the result of a false memory.
Why are leaves green? The most obvious answer is that they contain green pigments, the most abundant being chlorophyll and that chlorophyll absorbs the short and long wavelengths in the visible spectrum leaving the middle wavelengths to be reflected and scattered. However, the deeper question is why should chlorophyll absorb in the short and long wavelengths of the visible spectrum when there is more light available in the middle of the spectrum?
The spectral irradiance of sunlight varies with the time of day, the weather conditions, the time of year, and the latitude/longitude. However, I think it would be reasonable to say that by and large, in most situations, the peak irradiance is in the middle of the spectrum (that which we would normally associate with being green and yellow).
So if one assumes that evolution has produced a perfect engineering solution to this aspect of nature in particular then I think one may expect plants to absorb mainly in the middle part of the spectrum (and this would result in the bluish and reddish wavelengths being reflected and a purplish colour).
So why don’t we have a chlorophyll equivalent that is purple? I have come across a number of arguments.
1. One could go further and say that if a plant wanted to be really efficient it would absorb all wavelengths of the visible spectrum and would therefore appear black. So black, rather than purple, would be the perfect engineering solution. Given that most plants are neither black nor purple then I think we can assume that evolution did not find the perfect engineering problem or that the problem is more complex than we think. For example, it could be that a plant that is black would absorb too much light and overheat. Or it could be that chlorophyll evolved from some earlier light-sensitive chemical and that genetic mutations could lead more easily to chlorophyll than to purple or black pigments.
2. Taking this point further, I have heard it suggested that most plants evolved from earlier plants that lived under water and that absorbed mainly short wavelengths of light (long wavelengths – red – cannot penetrate much more than 1 m of water). These earlier cousins of the modern plant would most likely have been brownish. Indeed, if one looks today ay plants in seawater, green plants are only seen on the surface or at very low depths. So the ancestor of chlorophyll could have been a brown pigment which mutated into green chlorophyll more easily than it could have mutated into a purple pigment.
3. I have also come across the ‘early purple earth’ hypothesis. This suggests that originally most plant life on land was indeed optimally purple and that chlorophyll absorbed to take advantage of those wavelengths that were not already being gobbled up by the dominant species. Subsequently, chlorophyll proved more successful than its purple companion.
4. It could be argued that optimally absorbing light (and being purple) is not the most important thing and that there are other aspects of the problem that are more important. Green chlorophyll could be the optimal solution to this more complex problem.
In short, the real answer is … I don’t know. I am not overwhelmingly convinced by any of the above arguments.
If you enjoyed this post you may like to look at my special christmas post on carrots and why they are orange.
Many studies have been carried out over the last 50-100 years to look at which colours people like and which they don’t like. Although there is variability between individuals (not everyone likes the same colours) there is surprising consistency when the results of lots of different studies are compared. In short people like blues and greens and don’t like yellows and (to a lesser extent) reds. The hue parameter is probably the most important but brightness and colourfulness also affect colour preference. People tend to like brighter and more colourful colours than darker and less colourful ones. Just for fun, I have been running my own survey on this web site. You can still add your two-penneth worth if you like – please go to http://colourware.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/favourite-colour-poll/. Interestingly, my fun survey is also in broad agreement with all those previously published experiments. I found that people’s preferences were:
blue 19%
green 19%
purple 14%
red 11%
orange 8%
yellow 8%
pink 8%
black 4%
grey 4%
white 3%
brown 1%
other 1%
I am not sure what practical application there could be in knowing which colours are more popular. For example, my favourite colour is red but I probably wouldn’t want to buy a red coat. Though on average most people really like blue, this doesn’t mean it would be sensible to make a product blue without consideration of many other factors. In design, colour is almost always in context and that context makes all the difference in the world.
More interesting though is recent research I have read which proposes a reason why there is individual variation in colour preference. According to this idea, we like those colours that remind us of things that we like (we like blue skies and green grass). It could explain dark yellows and oranges are particularly unpopular; these colours are normally associated with some rather unsavoury things (dark orange is the colour of poo and dark yellow the colour of vomit). Further, if people have a strong affiliation with an idea/concept that is strongly associated with a colour, then they may have some preference bias towards that colour. It makes me think – I am a hug fan of Manchester United and red is my favourite colour; but do I like red because I like Manchester United or do I like Manchester United because I like red? I am too old to remember which came first.
Colour displays are now affordable and enjoyed by consumers at work, at home, on mobile displays and in cinemas. Consumers often take it for granted that there is good colour fidelity as images are transferred between different devices. So, for example, a red object in an image appears to be approximately the same red when the image is displayed on different computer displays, when it is printed, and when it is viewed on a mobile phone.
This colour fidelity is not easy to achieve. Different devices use very different technology to display colour images. For example, a computer display will mix together light from three primaries (red, green and blue) to generate a range (gamut) of colours. On the other hand, a printer uses completely different technology and typically uses mixtures of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to create the gamut of colours. Even computer monitors use a variety of different technologies (from CRT displays, which are becoming obsolete, to LCD, LED, and plasma technologies) each of which may use quite different red, green and blue primaries. Colour management is required to compensate for differences between the technologies (colour primaries, colour mixing, colour gamuts) between different image-display devices. This necessitates that the companies that produce image-display devices must cooperate so that the devices are able to talk to each other; this is achieved through the International Color Consortium (ICC) . The ICC is an industry consortium that was established in 1993 by eight industry vendors (including Microsoft and Apple). Today approximately 70 companies are members of the ICC whose goals are to “create, promote and encourage evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform colour management system architecture and components”. The ICC system is implemented in terms of device profiles and colour management system. The device profile is a computer file that is associated with each device (printer, camera, monitor, etc.) that essentially contains information to allow colour to be managed. In the case of a computer monitor, for example, the device profile would include information about the monitor’s primaries that would allow the colour image to be adjusted to compensate for the properties of the monitor so that the colours are displayed correctly. The colour management system is software that manages how these device profiles interact with each other and is normally part of the operating system of the computer.
Thus, when users capture, view, or print images they are using colour management all the time even though they may be unaware of it. Though this level of colour management is built into software and device drivers and is broadly invisible to the user it does enable colour consistency for images when they are captured, viewed and printed throughout the world. However, this level of default colour management is far from perfect. It does not, for example, generally account for changes in settings for a device (for example, a user may change the contrast, brightness, or colour temperature of a display) so that colour fidelity is, in practice, only approximate. This level of colour fidelity is probably sufficient to satisfy about 90% or more of consumers for whom colour is not a critical issue. However, for professionals working in industries where colour is a major concern (e.g. design, retailing) a higher level of colour management is often required. For these users, it is possible to obtain systems (typically low-cost colour-measurement devices and associated software) that allow a user-defined profile to be generated for a particular device with particular settings. This user-defined profile then over-rides the default profile and should enable a better level of colour fidelity to be achieved. Nevertheless, colour fidelity is always likely to be an imperfect issue. It is difficult for colour-management systems to perfectly compensate for the fact that, for example, different devices may generate quite different colour gamuts (typically, the bright red on a computer screen cannot be achieved by a CMYK consumer-level printer).
For ICC see www.color.org
In 2009 I blogged about a row in Derby about the yellow colour of taxis. But times change. Things move on, Today I am reading about a problem in Durham – for those who don’t know, Durham is in the north-east of England – about white taxis!! Apparently, this week ten drivers stormed out of a meeting with councillors over a proposal to adopt a policy for all-white colour taxis in the county of Durham. The argument for white taxis is that it would make them stand out and ensure that customers knew which taxis were legitimate. Sounds pretty sensible to me. It would work because white is a very unpopular colour for cars in the UK. I have heard that second-hand car salesmen refer to white as six-week white because it takes 6 weeks longer to sell a white car than other coloured cars. Whereas in other parts of the world, I have noticed in my travels that white cars are quite popular. Perhaps there is a business opportunity here – to export the unpopular white cars to places where they may sell for a premium.
There are two phrases I keep seeing written down all over the internet that cause my blood pressure to increase.
The first is that the colour primaries are red, yellow and blue (RYB). And the second is that the primaries are colours that cannot be made by mixing other colours. Neither of these statements are true, of course.
The first statement makes no distinction between additive colour mixing (of lights) and subtractive colour mixing (of paints and inks) but subtractive colour mixing is normally implied. However, RYB is a relatively poor choice for three colour primaries. The range of colours that can be produced is actually quite small. For most painters and artists it doesn’t matter because very few work in just three primaries – if they did so they would probably be frustrated by the small gamut of colours achievable. Many artists (painters) will use 10 or more basic colours to mix their palette. However, there is a group of people who care passionately about the gamut of colours that can be obtained by mixing three colour primaries – that is the people who work for companies such as HP and Canon. These companies make CMYK printers for the consumer market and their jobs depend upon consumers liking their printers. They understand that the largest gamut (in subtractive mixing) can be obtained if the primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). The teaching of RYB as the (subtractive) primaries should be stopped. It’s already gone on for far too long.
One reason I don’t like the teaching of RYB as being the subtractive primaries, in addition to the fact that it is wrong, is that it confuses people who are trying to learn colour theory. This is because red, yellow and blue seem to be quite pure colours and this encourages people to hold the second belief I don’t like which is that the primaries are pure colours that cannot be mixed from other colours. If people understood that the primaries were CMY it would be less tempting to hold this belief about the purity of the primaries. Of course, if you make a palette of colours of three primaries then it is true that no mixture of two or more colours from that palette can match any of the primaries. However, there are other colours (that are outside the gamut of the primary system) that could be mixed together to match the primaries. This false notion of purity confuses the real issue – that is, that the subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow because the additive primaries are red, green and blue. Look at this picture below:
The additive primaries are red, green and blue and the secondaries are cyan, magenta and yellow. Correspondingly, the subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow and the subtractive secondaries are red, green and blue. Simple.
I wrote about this before so for a slightly different perspective see my earlier post.
Perhaps I am so agitated about it today because I am just watching England getting trounced by Ireland at rugby when the Grand Slam was so tantalisingly close. Or maybe I will feel just the same tomorrow.