Livelygrey

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.

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.

This post digs into the difference between brightness and whiteness. This may sound as a silly little issue, which it probably is for anyone not very interested in color. But if you aim at boosting your color designing skills, you better bear with me.

Take a banana and a tomato and place them next to each other. You will notice that the banana is brighter than the tomato. The reason being that saturated yellow is brighter than saturated red. Each hue has its own 'natural' brightness.

The top half of this color circle is a lot brighter than the bottom. Yellow is located at the top, which is generally much brighter than the purple at the bottom.

If the colors in the color circle get converted to corresponding greys, the difference in brightness becomes quite apparent. The top of the circle reflects 90% of the light while the bottom only reflects 22%.

Now 'whiteness' comes into play. The whiteness of a color is the amount of white that a color contains. Imagine, for instance, a pot of yellow, a pot of red and a pot of white paint. For this to work both the red and the yellow paint should have similar saturation. If you add the same amount of white paint to the red and yellow, both colors will still have a difference in brightness. BUT, (this a very important but!) they will somehow be acquainted. They will both become a bit milky and a bit brighter but will retain a certain familiarity. The same goes for black. If you add the same amount of black to several colors of the same saturation, they will somehow belong together, notwithstanding their difference in brightness.

In this color circle, all the colors contain the same amount of white. Notice how the circle has become milky and tranquil.

Here's another example of the effect of classifying colors according to whiteness. I picked the top row of colors so that they all have a similar saturation. You can see that they vary wildly and will be hard to combine.
The bottom row was picked with similar saturation AND similar whiteness. As you can see, suddenly they seem to have something in common and won't be hard to combine into one design. As said, the same goes for black. Adding black will make the colors darker, but they will still retain their familiarity. Adding both black AND white will make the colors more grey, that is: less saturated.

For a designer there's great value in classifying colors according to whiteness/blackness rather than brightness. You will find that producing appealing color combinations becomes a piece of cake. Moreover, it is actually possible to predict which color combinations will appeal and which will not appeal to most of people. Stay tuned for further explanation in future posts.

NCS
As far as I'm aware (please anyone, correct me if I'm wrong...) there's only one color system in the world that classifies colors according to whiteness. I'm talking about the Natural Colour System (NCS) from Sweden. NCS is published by the Swedish Colour Institute (SCI) and serves as a major color standard in the European color industry. I would strongly advice any designer to purchase at least a simple NCS color fan deck. If you're located in Europe you might try to get a fan deck for free from one of the paint manufacturers who utilize NCS. That always worked for me. ;-). NCS is also available as palette for Photoshop and other major design applications.

As promised, some color games to improve your color skills. Click here to go to the menu. Have fun!

By popular demand, I've published a list of the most instructive books about color in my bookcase. You can find it on the right side of the homepage under the header 'Books'.
Enjoy!

Repeat after me: It's not about the colors, it's about how the colors relate to one another. Say it loud. Say it one thousand times. And never forget it.
Don't worry about what I mean by that. Just read this blog. Ultimately, each and every post on this blog is written to support this premise.

If color design is about how colors relate to one another, we must accept that it's more about contrasts than about single colors. That makes color contrasts among the most valuable assets in your color toolkit. And among the color contrasts, the most important is:

1 Contrast of Brightness


When it becomes darker, you will perceive brightness contrasts long after you cease to see the difference between red and green. This is simply the result of the build of our eyes. But other than that, there is no stronger contrast than between black and white. It's no coincidence that most texts appear as black characters on a white background. This blog is no exception.



2 Contrast of Hue


The second important contrast is the one of hue. Contrasts of hue can be quite powerful. Johannes Itten, the Bauhaus professor, defined 7 color contrasts. Among those were 'contrast of warm and cool' and 'contrast of complement'. But in fact, the two latter contrasts are subject to the contrast of hue.



3 Contrast of Saturation


This contrast can add subtlety to your design. But don't count on it to get a strong message across.






And that's it. Basically there are only 3 kinds of contrasts that you can use in a color design. They follow the 3 'dimensions' of color that I explained previously. However, the fun starts when you combine all 3 contrasts. In fact it's quite rare to see a one-of-a-kind contrast. Here are some real-life examples:



This color design has it all: the grey part on the right has a saturation contrast as well as a brightness contrast with the blue part. The orange button has a contrast of hue with its blue background, which makes it stand out very clearly. It's important to note that the button doesn't stand out because it's orange. It stands out because it is NOT blue! The functionality, the shapes and the colors fit exactly together in one brilliant design.






This design is mainly ton-sur-ton. Which means that the colors have no contrast of hue. Except for the display, which has specifically contrast of hue.










On first sight there is almost exclusively contrast of hue. But if you look carefully you will notice a brightness hierarchy.








This is a measuring device. The color design distinguishes two parts: the blue-grey front and the brown casing. The casing has a combination of all 3 contrasts with the front: brightness because the casing is much brighter than the front, hue because the bluish front and the brown casing are complementary, and saturation because the bluish front is much greyer than the casing. The buttons have a contrast of brightness with the front which makes them clearly visible without cluttering the overall design.







To illustrate the importance of contrasts, I photoshopped the brown cell phone to produce the second image in blue. But I left the contrasts intact in the blue phone. You may notice that while all the colors have been altered, the overall design didn't change much. My choice of colors didn't affect the shapes or composition. I suppose it's a matter of personal taste whether you prefer the blue or the brown version, but both designs are perfectly acceptable.
However, in the third image I took the exact same colors as in the first image and then applied them in a different manner. This caused a change in contrasts. As a result I completely ruined the design of the phone, without even changing my color palette!



So, again repeat after me: It's not about the colors.......

As it happens, I just came across several websites advising people to limit the number of colors in a design. What's wrong with this advice?

Proper use of color has nothing to do with the number of colors that have been applied. You only need to have a look at the work of Vincent van Gogh to be convinced. And obviously there are numerous other artists who have falsified this idea as well.

What is important is to structure your use of color. In other words: you need to have a clear idea of where your design is headed and how to get it there. Just for fun I looked up some well designed websites that use a large number of colors:
Colourful pictures incorporated into colourful texts and menus
A wild, yet very powerful use of colors
Funny but 'to the point' use of colors
On this Mercedes website color IS the structuring ingredient
And another website where color brings structure

Dutch artist Krijn de Koning transforms space with color. He produces colorful, maze like structures and imposes new meaning on existing space. De Koning was just awarded the 2007 Sikkens Prize, sponsored by paint giant Akzo-Nobel. He is in good company: Gerrit Rietveld, le Corbusier and Donald Judd were among previous laureates.
Krijn de Koning's work is not just amazing, it's fun as well. My kids love to play around in his art.

Congrats Krijn....

When I Googled "favourite color" I came up with 1930000 hits. The favourite color is apparently a favourite subject. Trouble is: there's no such thing as a favourite color. At least not in the form of a pot of paint or a color swatch.

First: it is impossible for the human eye to consistently identify a specific color. In other words: it is impossible to recognize the same color in different circumstances. Exactly why this is so is a long story on its own. But it involves phenomenons such as matamerism and color constancy.
Or, consider this example:

Second: the choice of color depends on how it is chosen. In other words: it all depends on how when and where the colors get picked. In fact a while ago I conducted an experiment in collaboration with Inholland University to test this premise. 30 people (consumers) were tested and interviewed to see how they pick colors. As part of the procedure they were asked to pick a favourite color from a fan deck. In a next step this color was combined with other colors in a set of 3 different color combinations. Then they were asked to pick their favourite combination. In a last step the color combinations were applied in a room and the people were asked to pick their favourite color scheme. Guess what? Only 6 out of 30 were consistent in their color choices. Meaning that their favourite color actually turned up in their color combination and in their room.
As an interesting aside the people were also asked to pick their least favourite color. It turned out that most people are a lot more confident and consistent in picking a color they dislike, than in picking a favourite color.
Obviously, using the Muller formula and other tricks, people can easily be manipulated into picking a particular combination. And when it comes to picking colors for a house, people simply do not pick one and the same favourite color for all the rooms. So why start out with asking for a favourite color when advising people? There must be more important questions to ask...

A favourite color, if it exists, only resides in the brain. It is fleeting. And that is perfectly fine. Until you try to tie it to a specific color swatch. There's this wonderful story of Oliver Sacks who tries in vain the find a color of blue he once experienced in a drugs invoked hallucination. He only encounters it once:
"...Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo -- they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since." (interview with Wired)
This anecdote pretty much sums it up. Looking for your favourite color among a number of color swatches is similar to Sacks looking for his mystical indigo. You'll never be able to find it in the 'real' world.

Hi all,
Sorry for not blogging. I've been terribly busy. And had to transfer all my files to not only a new computer, but a whole different OS as well. I've moved back from Windows to Mac. It sure is a relief, but it also takes a lot of re-adjusting...

Stay tuned for some new posts....

I bought myself a new car today. I couldn't resist when I set my eyes on it. The model is kind of vintage Mercedes, beautifully curved with a shiny radiator grille and golden bumpers. It even has hand crafted rims. Tell me, who could posibly resist a car like that?

Obviously, I was most impressed with its colors and delicate textures. The car has been crafted out of empty tin cans. If you look inside the car (it even has tiny chairs and a steering wheel) you can still see the brownish paint that used to be contained in the can.

Seeing the car, I see a kid somewhere in Africa or Asia putting it together out of a pile of junk. But most importantly, I see the kid passionately fussing over which piece of tin to choose for the roof, for the doors and the engine hood. That kid has realy put some effort into it. There's no piece to be found that hasn't been carefully hand picked and modelled for a designated place in the car.

As a result the car had some qualities that are lacking in industrial products: it has soul. Just look at that red roof and the red hood. The hood even has a yellow striping exactly where it meets the windshield.
Who wouldn't fall in love with such a piece of art?

Click here for a highres image.

I recently visited the National Museum in Athens which houses the world's largest collection of ancient Greek works of art. The collection is truly breathtaking. I can wholeheartedly recommend a visit.
There is nevertheless something odd about the museum. A leaflet claims the museum intends to give a good impression of antique art. But nothwithstanding the splendor of the collection, it hardly gives good impression of art in antiquity at all.
There main body of the collection consists of a vast number of marble statues. All the statues in the museum are bare marble of a grey-yellowish hue. However, in antiquity the statues (and buildings, for that matter) were painted in bright colors (gaudy colors as some modern scholars keep insisting). So bare marble hardly gives a good impression at all. Being a color geek I paid attention, but in the whole museum there was hardly a mention of color or paint to be found. When I did finally spot a small indication, I photographed it. The small sign next to the statue is about all the museum has to say on the subject of color. It sure leaves me with the impression that color on antique statues are still taboo.
I would love to see larger pictures of virtually painted statues next to each and every original. It shouldn't be much of a problem with a bit of modern technology combined with an old-fashioned sense of color.

Red is usuasally regarded as a color which visually leaps out. Red stand out. Red jumps off the page.
But does it really?
I found two interesting pictures on Flickr. Both contain a red button. The one button is highly visable, the other is almost hidden in its surroundings, even while it takes up a large part of the picture.

How come the one button stands out a lot more than the other? It's not because the button is red. It's because the background is NOT red. From a design perspective, that's a pretty important distinction...

Once again it's not about the colors, it's about how the colors relate to one another.

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...

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.

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...

Light is obviously quite important in the occurence of color. How important exactly can now be assessed through the billions of snapshots that have been uploaded onto the web. Many of those snapshots are from the same landmarks, such as the Taj Mahal in India. Waht would happen if you place a number of these snapshots next to eachother? What does it do to the appearence of the Taj Mahal?
I searched the popular photo site flickr.com for pictures of the Taj Mahal. It didn't took much effort to find thousands of them. That made it easy to identify several hundreds of snapshots of the exact same view. Here's a series of 6. You can tell by the shadows that I assembled them to represent different times during the day, from early in the morning till late in the evening.

Here's another series of Taj Mahal snapshots. Now at around the same time but on different days.

How to pick colors for your home:

1
Think combinations, not colors.
Picking colors is in fact about picking a combination of colors. One color is no color. Did you know the human eye can't even perceive single colors? We can only see color differences, in other words: we only perceive contrasts. Therefor it's no use fretting over a single color for your walls. Because the million dollar question is: how does that wall color relate to the existing color of your floor.

2
Start with the colors you can't change.
Obviously, a palette is made up of different colors that need to fit together. If you want to paint your room and you have colors you cannot change, like flooring, curtains or furniture, they still need to be part of the palette. Therefor always keep them in mind when picking the rest of the colors. As a rule of thumb, you start with the colors with the smallest range and work towards the widest range. For instance: look at your existing flooring and furniture first, then pick the new curtains, and finish with the wall color.

3
Get inspired.
There are many ways to get inspired. You can search the web. You can pick a flower and match its colors to a paint fan deck. You can take any picture or painting you like and extract colors from it. It's really not that hard. Just pick something that inspires you and match it to paint colors to produce a great palette. A few hints to keep in mind when making a palette:
• Try to include light as well as dark colors. Remember: contrasts are key.
• If you go for greys, pick at least one bright color to accentuate.
• If you go for bright colors, combine it with at least one shade of grey to provide your palette with a neutral tone.

4
Visualize
Once you established at least some idea of a palette and a rough idea of what it should look like, you can start experimenting, using Colorjive (for now, only here). Just try out different ideas. Don't be shy, you can change colors in an instant. Once you know your wall should be blue for instance, you can try different shades of blue till you find the one that works for you.
You can use the software to show the result to your friends and family. After all, they'll have to put up with it.

5
Check your choice
When you use the color codes to order paint in the shop, first take a good look at the color swatch to make sure this is the color you want. Colors onscreen may differ from real life colors. If you are still a bit uncertain, buy a sample or a small pot of paint first. Then paint a small surface to see if it works. And remember: it's only paint. Worst case scenario is repainting. So you can afford to take some chances.