Everyone who works in colour has heard of Pantone. The Pantone Matching System has been used for decades for colour specification and colour communication. This month Pantone have unveiled a new system – Pantone Plus. Apparently, Pantone Plus provides users with expanded colour sets and more intuitive selection method to help streamline the creative process. I look forward to seeing it.
I have been thinking of attending a meeting of the Color Marketing Group which is to be held in Amsterdam on 26-28th May 2010. Amsterdam is only about 45 mins by plane from Leeds so if I can get a flight I will go. It looks a really good event. For further details see www.colormarketing.org
For several decades there has been a great interest in understanding how we use colour names. Do we use the same colour categories (even though they may be called different things in different languages) irrespective of language and culture; in other words, is our perception of colour the same across all cultures and this shapes our use of colour names? Or, is our perception of colour shaped by our language. A well-known study by Berlin and Kay in the late 1960s suggested that language is shaped by perception. But the alterantive hypothesis – known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that perception is shaped by language also has support. We may soon know more about this issue because of an interesting on-line colour experiment being carried out by a scientist at Hewlatt-Packard. California-based Nathan Moroney’s multi-lingual colour-naming experiment uses a clever design that allows each participant to perform a small part of the experiment; but when lots of people take part – from all parts of the world and using different languages – some interesting and valuable data is collected. I won’t say any more about the work here because it is not complete yet; but I urge you to go and take part in the experiment. It only takes a minute or less to do it. And there is a debriefing document that you can read about the results obtained so far. Please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/mlcn.html.
Meanwhile a study by Skirinko (at the University of Virginia) and colleagues at Rice University reveals that the colour names that companies such for their products can have a big effect on sales. Consumer reactions are more positive to fancy names such as mocha as opposed to simple and generic names such as brown. The explanation for this is based on categorical perception; people use categories and a name such a mocha maps to a more positive cataegory than the simpler brown. So it is perhaps not jsut the colour of a product that affects sales; sales may also be affected by the langauage used to describe the colours of products.
The work by Skirinko et al. was published in Psychology and Marketing in 2006.
Does wearing a white T-shirt really help you keep cool in the summer?
Absolutely. White objects tend to reflect most of the light that falls upon them no matter what the wavelength in the visible spectrum. Objects are often coloured because they selectively absorb certain wavelengths of light preferentially compared with other wavelenghs that are then reflected. But what happens to the light that is absorbed? Well, in most cases dye or pigment molecules absorb the energy and go to a higher energy state. But as every physicist knows, energy must be preserved. Eventually, the energy is released, usually in the form of heat. Now an object which is black is a very strong absorber and often absorbs much of the light at all wavelengths in the visible spectrum. Therefore a black T-shirt will heat up when exposed to the sun when compared with a white T-shirt.
This idea has been taken further by a team of MIT graduates who have developed roof tiles that change colour based on the temperature. The tiles become white when it’s hot, allowing them to reflect away most of the sun’s heat. When it’s cold they turn black and absorb heat when it’s needed.
In their white state the tiles reflect about 80% of the sunlight falling on them, while black they reflect about 30%. That means in their white state, they could save as much as 20% of present cooling costs, according to recent studies.
The tiles use a common commercial polymer in a water solution. That solution is encapsulated — between layers of glass and plastic in their original prototype, and between flexible plastic layers in their latest version — with a dark layer at the back.
When the temperature is below a certain level the polymer stays dissolved and the black backing shows through, absorbing the sun’s heat. When the temperature climbs, the polymer condenses to form tiny droplets, whose small sizes scatter light and thus produce a white surface, reflecting the sun’s heat.
The team was one of the competitors in this year’s Making and Designing Materials Engineering Contest (MADMEC) a competition for teams of MIT students.
For further information see http://thermeleon.com/
I just came across this website – http://www.colorgorize.com/about/
The first version of Colorgorize was published in 2007 as a project at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. Back then, Colorgorize was a Firefox add-on that could display similar colored websites to the website currently opened. Colorgorize was changed to a website in 2009 to reach a bigger audience. Today, thousands of websites are already analyzed and can be searched by colors.
Colorgorize is essentially a site where you can get inspiration for web-design colours and palettes. It works by shrinking imags of webapages that can be organized according to your colour preference.
The idea is that you can use this pen to point at any object in the world, the pen then ‘extracts’ the colour, and then is able to write in that colour using a mixture of RGB inks that it contains.
Unfortunately, it’s just a concept, designed by Jinsu Park.
As far as I know there are no practical implementations of this interesting idea. One could make a strong argument that the pen should use CMY (or even red, yellow and blue) primaries since RGB primaries would result in a tiny colour gamut and wouldn’t allow the pen to reproduce any real colours at all. See http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/what-is-a-colour-primary/
I just came across another interesting colour site – www.colorexplorer.com
This site provides a free service – you can upload an image and the site will extact a colour palette from the image (you can specify how many colours you wish to extract). Palettes are notated in hex codes and RGB values.
I just tried with with one of my images and chose to extact three colours; the result is shown below:
If you want to use a photograph as an inspiration for interior design, for example, you can write down the RGB values and then go to www.easyrgb.com – this site allows you to convert RGB values into commercial paint codes.
In a previous post I talked about colour blindness and the possibility of using coloured lenses to improve colour discrimination for suffers of colour blindness – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/colour-blindness-news/
The task of designing images or copy that are legible to colour-blind users is a major concern in design. In the past I have used websites that allow you to submit an image or even a whole website and a simulation of how it might apear to a colour-blind viewer would be produced. Today I came across a really great tool called Color Oracle – see http://colororacle.cartography.ch/. This tool is free to download and runs on Windows or Mac systems. Once installed it runs in your system tray and allows you to simulate various colour-blindnessc conditions. The software is free to download and claims to use the latest algorithms for simulating colour-vision impairments. Below is one of my images and a simulation of how it would appear to someone with tritanopia.
Colour management is needed to try to ensure that when using computer systems colour fidelity is achieved across different machines and between soft and hard copy. Computers represent colour as three numbers, RGB. But the same RGB values displayed on different monitors will usually result in a different on-screen colour. In addition, there could be colour gamut issues; one monitor may be able to display colours that are simply out of the achievable range of another. When we consider printers the problem is even worse. The gamut of a printer is very different to that of a computer display. And printers tend to represent colour in terms of CMY or CMYK values. So the colour-management software has rather a lot to do to satisfy users.
A great deal of colour management goes on in computer systems of which the average user is completely unaware. This uses default settings and makes various assumptions but is normally good enough so that reds appear red and blues appear blue on any computer display or printer. Colour management has been built in to Apple software for a long while and is now also part of the Microsoft operating system. But the professional user may require more than is offered by the basic colour management that comes as part of all new systems. However, professional-level colour management comes at a cost and it’s not just financial. It is usually necessary to have to characterize each device (monitor display, printer etc.) that is to be used; and this requires colour measurment and some knowledge of colorimetry.
I recently came across a new product – ColorMunki 1.1 – released by X-rite that promises enhanced colour performance for colour-critical users. This seems to be an interesting product in that it is aimed at designers and photographers.
ColorMunk 1.1 – http://www.colormunki.com/ – is in fact a suite of software that also include a device for measuring colour. I am looking forward to trying this out. If anyone has any experience of this system that they would like to share it would be vey helpful.
The use of appropriate colour in a logo can be critical for the success of the logo and the brand it represents. Take the following two examples: one for a bank and one for a recycling company. It is important that colour chosen communicates those attributes with which the company would like to be associated. Blue is associated with conservatism and is a very safe colour. As such it is a very popular choice with banks and other institutions.
On the other hand the use of green in an eco-friendly company’s logo is a somewhat obvious choice given the association of green with the green movement.
However, colour is not the only important attribute for a successful logo. The most interesting features of two of my favourite logos are not really colour related at all. First, consider the Fedex logo.
When I ran a software company in the 1990s I used FedEx a great deal; however, I didn’t notice the white arrow embedded in the logo between the E and x of the logo. Of course, this arrow beautifully represents what the company does – the arrow represents movement and speed. There is a very interesting interview with the logo’s creator, Linden Leader, that you can read online: http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000273.php
I also very much admire the Amazon logo. Like the FedEx logo it is clean and simple and that is part of its success. However, it has two other interesting features. Firstly, the arrow below the text cleverly goes from A to Z – reinforcing the message that you can purchase anything from A to Z at Amazon. However, the arrow is also finely crafted to appear like a smile, reinforcing the idea that shopping at Amazon will be a happy experience.
