Livelygrey

This post is in response to a reader question (thanks Christine).

Color is an event that occurs among three participants, lightsource, object and observer. It should therefor come as no surprise that one and the same object will look different under differing lichtsources. Your clothes do not have the same color under a fluorescent tube, a regular light bulb or in sunlight. However, most of the differences are 'corrected' in our brain by a fascinating psychological process called 'color constancy'.
For today, however, I'll focus on another interesting subject related to lighting: Metamerism.

A color is always composed of light of different wavelengths. Sunlight, for instance, can be deconstructed to the colours of the rainbow. But also a surface can be deconstructed in a spectral analysis.

This is the spectral analysis of a certain shade of red:
This is the spectral analysis of almost exactly the same color red:
There's something peculiar about these two colors: they are metamere. Which means that perceived in a certain light, in this example sunlight, they will appear exactly the same to our eyes. But under another source of light, say an electric bulb, they will appear different.
Metamerism is a quite common phenomenon that can cause problems in color schemes. If, for instance, the same color is ordered from different manufacturers, there's a distinct possibility that they will be metamer. Which means they will not be the same in all circumstances. This is because different manufacturers use different pigments. Metamerism is something to keep in mind when trying to match two colors. You should therfor make sure to match the colors under the proper lightsource. If you're trying to match colors for the facade of your house you should evaluate them in sunlight. If you're comparing two colors for interior use, match them under the kind of light you're planning to use in your room. If the colors will be utilised in differing circumstances (clothes come to mind) all bets are off...

These days we are strugling to cope with a huge stream of emails, twitters, rss feeds, instant messages, pokes, voip calls or whatever else is out there to catch your attention. We are overwhelmed and overfed by all these streams of information crossing the web and hitting our consiousness. How can your boss's important email make it past the junk in your inbox? How can you tell this instant message is important and needs immediate attention? How would you know that a certain email refers to a recent blog entry? How about creating a visual interface to make sense of all these message and information streams?

We could perhaps think of the web as a soup pot. As heat is applied to the bottom of the pot, pieces of carrot and meat rise to the surface. This process is chaotic and dependent on how different substances absorb and loose heat and how large the pieces are. We only percieve the pieces that float on top. The stuff in the middle or at the bottom is invisable.
The question is, how do we get the best pieces to float to the top?

In modern aviation, pilots and air-traffic controllers also have to cope with a huge stream of information. One of the methods to do this is to apply color structure and color coding to complex information displays.
I am proposing to apply the same sort of design techniques to the web.

This is what the visual interface could look like:
The idea is that a piece of information that requires your attention would come floating on top, thus catching your eye. Imagine a cloud of floating and moving icons, each representing a specific piece of information. The shape of the icon would represent the stream of information: email, twitter, rss or whatever. Colors would indicate certain assocations. For instance, an email and an instant message on the same subject would share the same color. Or perhaps all your boss's messages would turn bright red. The size and the place of the icon would determine it's importance. Icons would float to the surface and then slowly sink to the bottom again, to disappear if they are ignored. An advanced analysis should determine how close to the surface an icon would float. In other words: the application would determine how much your attention is required and then place the icon accordingly within your attention range.
When hovering over an icon, the content of the icon is shown: the email message, the blog entry or anything else. This would be a preview. To reply to the email, you're sent to your email client. To read the full blog entry you're sent to your web browser. The visual interface wouldn't be a browser nor an email client. But it would provide you with a serene yet intelligible view on all your information streams.

What do you know...
Just after finishing my Google analysis, a new search engine launched: Cuil. So I decided to perform another color analysis.

Here's Cuil:While this is cool:Can you see the difference?

Here's what I did:
• The blue color was used inconsequential. Now everything blue indicates links or clickable objects. The only exception is the cuil logo
• I played with the contrasts to make some things more better visable. The i in Cuil was too dark and didn't stand out enough from the background. Same goes for the 'search' button. The search button is, after all, what Cuil is all about. So you better damn well make it an eye catcher. Same thing in the bottom bar. I toned down the '2 Columns' indication. It IS already 2 columns and I can see that. I'm only interested to find the option '3 columns' when I need it. So '3 colomns' should be better visable than' 2 columns' and should be blue as well to show it is clickable. Same thing goes for the page numbers.
• I have no idea what the green links at the bottom of each search result are all about. They are copies of the links at the top of the result. I don't understand why it should be green either. So I made it grey to tone it down. They could be dropped for all I care but hey, I'm just the color guy...

Just to have a little fun, I tried reconstructing the Google color scheme. Just to see if I could improve it in only half an hour with a bit of Photoshop magic. Here's what a Google results page looks like, these days:
If I throw our all the details and just concentrate on the blocks of color in the page, then this is what I see:
The current page isn't very well organized. The page kind of falls apart. There's an awfull lot going on where it comes to color. The colors tend to bounce your eyes from one location in the page to the other. The page definitely lacks color structure. The only reason Google gets away with the color design is because they are extremely carefull not to clutter the page with redundant information.
I'll concentrate on making the page header more visable, to seperate it more clearly from the search results. I'll turn the header into one block of color. This is what it could look like:
Now if I translate this back into the page design, this is what I come up with:
I'd say the page is much more structured now. I'm not saying this is a good design. This is merely a quicky to show what you can do with a bit of color structuring. It would need a lot more effort to make it real good.

Please note that I didn't change the color scheme at all. These are the same old colors. I only applied the colors in a different manner.

Here's an interesting movie about color on the Apple website.

Lately I've been contemplating the value of rounded corners in design. Is it eye-candy? Or does it add value to the user experience?
Let me put it this way:
I hope it is clear that the rounded corners do make a difference. On the left side, you see one surface devided by a line. On the right side you see two adjoining boxes. The difference? Only the rounded corners.
How does that translate into color? Lines can easily be interpreted as contrasts. If we do so, we get the following image:
Again: on the left one surface, on the right two boxes. The unity of shape and color forms an image.

BTW: I hate it that the blogging software (Movable Type) draws a box around my illustrations. In this case it pretty much destroys the effect. However, I'm not well versed in CSS, so I'm afraid I'll have to live with it...