The latest CGIV (European Conference on Colour in Graphics, Imaging, and Vision) conference is taking place in Amsterdam now (6-9 May 2012). CGIV covers a wide range of topics related to colour and visual information, including color science, computational color, color in computer graphics, color reproduction, color vision/psychophysics, color image quality, color image processing, and multispectral color science. For further details see here.
Tag Archives: colour
Nadal hits out at never-before-seen colour
I was quite excited to come across this news story today. I do sometimes get asked by people about colours that nobody has ever seen before. So the notion that Nadal had seen one was quite interesting. However, it turns out that it is not a colour that has never been seen before but a clay colour that has never been used before in a ranking tennis tournament. Doh!!
The controversial use of blue courts at the ATP-WTA Madrid Masters may be a poor choice. One of the requirements of a clay court colour is to ensure good contrast between the ball and the ground.
pink or red?
The purpose of this blog is to collate all sorts of interesting facts and news stories for which colour is a main component and also to provide some education about colour and colour science. So I scan the newspapers and websites for interesting stories about colour that I can comment on (actually, I mainly look at news stories on google). Over the last three years or so I have come across all kinds of interesting topics but today I came across something quite unexpected.
Today I came across some research led by Sarah Johns at the University of Kent that reveals that men prefer pink female genitals to red ones. Her team set up a website that allowed women to submit (anonymously, you will be pleased to know) photographs of their parts. Four of these photos were each retouched (digitally) so that one pale pink, another light pink, one dark pink and the final one red. They then asked 40 heterosexual men to rate each of the 16 images on a scale of 0-100 for attractiveness. The researchers had thought that men may prefer red vulvas since it is commonly thought that red lipstick and clothing is a proxy for genitals. So it was somewhat surprising when they found that men preferred the pink photographs to the red ones.
For more details on this story please visit here.
colour maps
Last year a student, Kaori, from Japan spent some time with me at Leeds and we spoke a lot about how to use colour effectively in maps and in urban design generally. One of the issues we were looking at was whether the maps’ features would be discriminable to colour-blind observers (of which, of course, there are many). So I was interested to come across an interesting article today relating to this very issue.
Apparently the following image appeared in the Guardian newspaper:
It’s a colour-coded map of London. It shows areas of deprivation with red being the most deprived. It met with much criticism, however, and many people said they had difficulty in discriminating between the colours. Of course, colour-blind observers most commonly have difficulty discriminating in the red-green region of colour space. The company who made the map engaged in a debate with users on twitter and created variously different coloured versions of the map, subjecting each to the public vote via twitter. The map below is one of the later versions.
For further details please refer to the story at The Guardian here.
chemical additives
A few weeks ago I posted about the safety of food colours. My argument was that the issue is not whether food additives are natural or man-made (let’s even say chemical because that really sounds nasty – even though water is a chemical and we are made of chemicals). Rather, the issue is whether any additives are safe or not, since plenty of natural products are highly dangerous (even fatal) and the vast majority of man-made additives are perfectly safe. My good friend, Mark Bishop (Professor at Goldsmiths) commented that maybe people feel safer with natural additives because they have been around for longer and so we are more certain about whether they are safe or not. He may have a point – today it was revealed that 4-methylimidazole (which is added to Pepsi and Coca-Cola) is carcinogenic. Presumably this chemical was once thought to be safe.
women like pink
I don’t know if it is related to my recent post that people, especially females buy bright colours in times of austerity, but I just came across a report that claims that women like pink gadgets and laptops.
Dr Gloria Moss, Reader in Human Resources at Bucks New University said:
“There’s a very strong tendency for men to prefer hard, rectangular and dark shapes. While women showed a preference towards more curved, and pink design. I don’t think it’s anything for women to be afraid of that women like different colours, because the roots of the colour preference take womens’ responsibility beyond hearth and home. The differences have their origins in the different activities carried out by men and women over the ages.”
Moss used a range of website designs created by men and women to test her hypothesis amongst a sample group of students at Oxford. Men preferred linear, rectangular designs, while women preferred colourful designs with large images.
I’m a man but I also like pink. So clearly the above does not apply to all women and all men.
For balance see my post on pink stinks.
people buy red when times are tough
According to a recent consumer report people in the UK are buying bright colours, particularly red, to cheer themselves up in these times of austerity. Apparently a third of all sales of women’s jeans are in colours other than blue.
According to Fiona Lambert, George Brand Director:
“In challenging times people purchase bright colours across both fashion and beauty to lift their spirits. Customers have told us they want to be bold and steer away from the “safe” option of black, and have been looking at affordable ways to lift their moods by buying coloured items.”
natural colours
The Guardian has reported that Nestlé has removed artificial ingredients from their entire confectionary range. However, I am not sure that this is worth making too much of a song and dance about. The public have a natural aversion to artificial colorants. Surely natural is better? Well, not necessarily.
The foliage and berries of the Deadly Nightshade plant are extremely toxic. Apple seeds can be fatal if eaten in large enough quantities (they contain a small amount of amygdalin). The kidney bean is poisonous if not correctly cooked. The puffafish – known in Japan as Fugu – can be lethally poisonous due to its tetrodotoxin; therefore, it must be carefully prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat. All of these things are natural.
Lots of natural products are not harmful. But there are many many artificial chemicals that are completely identical (chemically) to their naturally occurring and harmless equivalents. It’s strange that we are so keen to believe that natural is good and man-made is bad. Sometimes it is true, but sometimes it is not.
why I don’t like the colour wheel
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
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.
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