Entries tagged with “color” from Livelygrey

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...

Before we proceed into the depths of color, let's first cover some of the basics.
Effective color communication depends on the proper use of language. All colors can be described in terms of brightness, saturation and hue. What exactly do we mean by that?

For the sake of convenience all possible colors can be fitted into the shape of a cone. The greys will be found on the axis. Upwards the colors become brighter, downwards they become darker. Towards the outside the colors become more saturated, in other words: less grey. All colors of the rainbow can be found in a circle around the axis. This model helps us to understand the meaning of the terms brightness, saturation and hue.

In the cone we can mark out a triangle. All the colors located on one triangle have the same hue. An orange has the same hue as fire, which has the same hue as a pineapple. Allthough pineapples generally are much darker than oranges. A leaf has the same hue as grass, which has the same hue as jade. The sky has the same hue as the IBM logo, which has the same hue as the mediterranean sea and a pair of jeans. Likewise, a banana has the same hue as a custard dessert and a lemon. Get the picture? All of the colours in the row below the cone are located on one triangle and have the same hue, even though some are more greyish, and some are darker than others. The row of colors below the previous cone all have a similar hue.

We can also mark out a belt with colors that all have the same distance to the axis. All the colors on the belt have the same saturation. Imagine having a pot of grey and a pot of red paint. The more red you add to the grey paint, the more saturated it becomes. Some people would say: it becomes more lively. The pot of red paint has a maximum saturation, the pot of grey paint has a minimum saturation. Replacing the red paint by a can of yellow, green or blue doesn't alter the saturation, it only changes the hue. All colors in the row below the cone have a similar saturation, even though they don't share the same hue or brightness.

In the cone a circular surface is marked out where all the colours have the same brightness. Brightness is related to the amount of light that is reflected by a color. Bright colors high up in the cone reflect a lot of light while colors down at the bottom reflect very little light and are therefor less bright. The row of colors below the cone all have a similar brightness.
In a next post I will offer some fun interactive exercises that will help you learn how to classify colors.

Oh my...
There we go again. I came across this page at dwell.com where Fred A. Bernstein says:

I’ve always been vaguely embarrassed by color, associating pastels with kitsch and primaries with kindergarten. I’m not even sure I agree with Meier, who claimed, in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, that he likes white “because within it you can see all the colors of the rainbow.” I like white because within it I can’t see all the colors of the rainbow.

For your education, Fred, here’s a picture of a Richard Meier building. I measured some of the colors I found on the building in the picture and put them at the bottom. Incidentally: I didn’t spot any white. This is a picture with ‘normal’ lighting. Things can get really drastic when the lighting gets more dramatic. Below you’ll find an example, which I grabbed from Richard Meier’s website.

Here’s a question for you, Fred: Why does Richard Meier publish only color images of his work?
To choose a white or grey surface for a building is as much a color choice as any other. Look at the work of Le Corbusier. He used brightly painted surfaces alongside bare concrete. I somehow don’t think that was because he ran out of paint...

The White House in Washington is a Georgian style building. Georgian architects employed a decorative style derived from ancient Greece and Rome. Which explains the white painted surface, because it was generally assumed that the ancient Greek and Roman buildings were white. After all, when looking at pictures of the archetypical example of classical architecture, the Parthenon in Athens, it always looks white.

Only recently I visited the Parthenon for the first time. And probably similar to most architects in this world, I had always assumed that it is white.
Well....
It isn't.
The color of the Parthenon is more like ochre, which is not white by a long shot. I suppose most of the pictures of the Parthenon are shot so that they more or less represent our cliche image of it, instead of representing the actual situation. But as the saying goes: every picture is a lie. If indeed the design of the White House was derived from classical architecture, its color is simply plain wrong. But there's more to it.....
In fact the Parthenon, and all other major classical buildings, were originally painted in bright colors. I will delve deeper into this subject in future posts, but just trust me on this for the time being. This also means that the colors of neo-classical buildings such as the White House are based on a misconception. In fact it would probably be more historically accurate, not to mention more fun, to repaint the White House in pink. ;-)

Any publication about color should start with a definition of color. There are nearly as many ideas about what color is as there are people on this earth. So in order clarify what is meant with the term ‘color’ on these pages, here’s a definition:

‘Color is an event that occurs among three participants: a lightsource, an object and an observer.’

I first came across this definition in the book ‘Real World Color Management’ by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting. It is by far the most usefull definition I ever read because it nicely touches all the things important about color.
Color is an event because it involves an occurrence, something that happens at a certain time in a certain place. The light is involved because it is the ‘carrier’ of color. Without light there’s no color. Light may exist without color, but in that case it’s invisable. Just look up on a starry night and you will notice that the space between the stars is pitchblack. Yet we can be sure all that all visible stars fill that space with light. But because the light doesn’t bounce off on anything, doesn’t meet any surface, it remains invisable to us and without meaning.
The second participant in the color event is surface. The surface is what most people actually associate with the term color. The surface may be for instance a layer of paint, paper or skin.
Lastly the observer. The observer is often neglected but is nevertheless very important. The observer very much determines the color event. Eyes may differ in sensitivity from one person to the next. But much more influential is what goes on in the observer’s brain: color constancy, perceptual order etc. In the brain of the observer, white may be seen as black, black may be seen as white, red may be seen as green. It is the brain of the observer that keeps insisting on ‘seeing’ paper white, even though the color may not be white at all due to lighting, when entering the eye. You don’t believe white may be black? Here’s a picture by Edward Adelson that may convince you:

I actually once asked Fred Bunting about the origin of the afore mentioned definition. Not willing to take full credit, he traced it back to various philosophers as well as his own work at Pixar studios. Nevertheless, he probably was the first to put it in this exact phrasing.