I just came across this nice article – http://understandinggraphics.com/design/10-reasons-to-use-color/ – entitled 10 reasons to use color.
The article lists 10 good reasons to use colour in design. Number 10 is using colour for metaphor and taking advantage of the associations that are inherent in phrases such as feeling blue or green with envy. There is no doubt about the meaning in the image below; that the woman is filled with envy.
As some of you may know, I was General Chair of AIC2013 this year. We had a great time in Newcastle and spent a week with over 600 delegates talking about colour. But time moves on and we are approaching 2014. I would therefore like to draw your attention to the next AIC meeting which is in Mexico in October 2014. The theme is colour and culture and the venue – Oaxaca – is stunning. I hope to see you there.
For further details visit http://www.aic2014.org/index_en.html
Imagine that we have three projection lamps at the back of a hall – one has a red filter and so produces a beam of red light, and the other two use filters to produce green and blue beams. We project these onto a white screen and get three circles of light (one, red, one green and one blue). We then move the angles of the projectors so that the circles of light overlap. We get something that looks rather like this:
Where the red and green light overlap we get yellow. We get magenta and cyan for the other two binary mixtures. So,
red + green = yellow
red + blue = magenta
green + blue = cyan
This is called additive colour mixing as I am sure you know. And if we mix all three primaries we can achieve white (or other neutral colours). The primaries could be single wavelengths of light – so we could use a primary at, say, 700 nm (for the red) and one at 450 nm (blue) and one at 530 nm (green). So green light (530 nm) and red light (700 nm) additively mix together and generate yellow. When this happens what is being mixed and where does this mixing take place? Take a few moments to consider this before reading on.
Notice I said that they additively mix to generate yellow – I specifically avoided saying that they mix to generate yellow light. When I sat down with a couple of students last week and asked then what they though they said that the red and green light mixed together to create yellow light and when I pressed them, they went further to say that the yellow light was at about 575 nm.
If we measure the part of the screen that is yellow we would see that we have some light at 700 nm and some at 530 nm. The wavelengths are not mixed; they don’t mix together to generate some third wavelength of light such as 575 nm. So no physical mixing takes place other than – I suppose one could argue – that the red and green lights are mixed in the sense that they are spatially coincident. But that’s not really mixing, for me, and certainly doesn’t even begin to explain why we have the sensation of yellow when we look at these wavelengths together. It also makes me think that additive colour mixing, if it can be said to occur anywhere in particular, occurs in the eye. And I do mean eye, not brain.
I would argue that there is no such thing as visible light – or at least that the term visible light is a meaningless one.
Light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum which is describes electromagnetic radiation by its wavelength. An electromagnetic wave has both electric and magnetic field components. What is really very interesting is that depending upon the wavelength of the field the electromagnetic radiation has very different properties and we give it a different name.
When the wavelength is very long, the radiation is radio waves or micro waves. When the wavelength is very short, the radiation is x-rays or gamma rays. There is a narrow range of wavelengths (from about 360 nm to about 780 nm – a nm is 0.000000001 of a metre) to which our eyes are sensitive. Because we can literally see this radiation we call it light. I still find it amazing that light, x-rays, radio waves, and microwaves are all essentially the same thing (electromagnetic radiation) with just a change in the wavelength!! However, my point for today is that light is radiation that is visible – to talk about visible light would be bizarre since by its very definition light is visible. Technically, visible light is a pleonasm; pleonasm is a word derived from the Greek word “pleon” meaning excessive. Other examples of pleonasms – easily confused with oxymora – include the phrases end result and invited guests.
Very interested in this new colour-measurement device called the swatchmate cube.
The new device is launched by Swatchmate on November 13th. That;s two day’s time from now. It captures the colour and displays it on your smartphone. Does it provide any numerical data such as CIELAB? I don’t know. How much is it? I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out at the launch!!
I have written a few times about various legal cases that are on-going to settle disputes about colour ownerships. For example, about 18 months ago I wrote about trademarking colour and the dispute between Cadbury and its competitors over the use of the colour purple (specifically Pantone 2685C) on chocolate packaging and advertising. In that blog I noted that Cadbury had lost a case in the USA against Darrell Lea but had been granted protection in the UK despite protests from Nestlé. The law is a complex matter.
However, today, in the BBC I read that Nestlé has won a court battle with Cadbury, over Cadbury’s attempt to trademark the purple colour of its Dairy Milk bars. This is a successful appeal by Nestlé to the earlier ruling. The Court of Appeal said that Cadbury’s trademark application lacked “the required clarity, precision, self-containment, durability and objectivity to qualify for registration”.
“We are disappointed by this latest decision but it’s important to point out that it does not affect our long held right to protect our distinctive colour purple from others seeking to pass off their products as Cadbury chocolate,” said a Cadbury spokesman. Watch this space!!
I am currently carrying out some research using an on-line questionnaire about colour choices by consumers in product design. It would really help me a lot if you would take the survey. It only takes about 1 minute to complete. The link is http://questionpro.com/t/AKSnxZP9ij. Please feel free to share this link.
In a few weeks when the survey is completed you can come back to this page and you can see more details about what we were doing, why we were doing it, and what we found.
Steve
Yahoo launched a new logo this year. I was interested that according to this website Yahoo chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt described the purple as whimsical saying “We wanted a logo that stayed true to our roots (whimsical, purple, with an exclamation point) yet embraced the evolution of our products.” Interesting.
I then found a really interesting website that is all about logos called logopedia. Well worth looking at. To build excitement towards the launch of the 2013 Yahoo logo, they released about 30 variations of the theme in the weeks leading up to the official release.
A few years ago I just didn’t really get the Kindle. Why would anyone buy a device that looks and behaves like something several generations behind a modern tablet? After all, can’t an iPad do every a Kindle can do and lots more? That was before I tried a Kindle and understood what people mean by e-paper. Fundamentally an iPad is a light-emissive device whereas the Kindle is a light-reflective device. In the dark the iPad is great but try reading it on a sun bed on holiday. Whereas the Kindle is hard to read in the dark but is easier to read in very bright conditions; just like an old-fashioned book or newspaper.
But there are two things that still let e-paper technology down. The refresh rate is slow and it’s mainly still just shades of grey. Where is the colour e-paper that promised to revolutionise our mobile displays? According to industry expert Sean Buckley the technology of colour e-paper may be grinding to a halt. And now it seems that consumers are losing interest in e-readers anyway. To read Sean’s fascinating account in full please click here.
What goes around, comes around. The original Apple logo was rather garishly coloured. From 1976 until 1998 it was an apple with coloured horizontal stripes. The 1976 logo had its origins in an even earlier logo that was a hand drawn picture of Newton with an apple over his head. Steve Jobs insisted on the colours to humanise the company and the 1976 logo was designed by Rob Janoff with the coloured stripes also representing that the Apple II could generate graphics in colour. It’s hard to imagine that this was a big deal then but it was!! When I studied for my PhD in the early 1980s my computer had no colour, no hard drive and just 16 k (that’s 16 k, not 16 GB or 16 MB) of RAM. We take massive memory, processing power and colour for granted in our digital devices today. But I digress. In 1998 Apple discontinued the rainbow theme and started to use monochromatic themes (I used this word because more people would understand it to mean black and white but monochromatic is really single colour and a better would be achromatic). In the last 15 years or so I think it’s fair to say that Apple have used both monochromatic and achromatic versions of their famous logo.
Interesting then that in March 2012 Apple unveiled a new logo that is full of colour. See the right-most image in the picture above (image from Gizmodo UK) Everything comes back into fashion if you wait long enough.
I was inspired to write this by reading two other blogs; please visit them for further information:
Eliza Brooke’s blog.
Rob Mead-Green’s blog.