Livelygrey

Reconstructing Google

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:14:51 +0100

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.

Apple Color Movie

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:34:36 +0100

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

Rounded Corners

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:49:24 +0100

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...

Color Spacing

Thu, 08 May 2008 08:30:50 +0100

Red Buttons

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:31:29 +0100

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.

The Greek National Museum

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:13:51 +0100

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.

My New Car

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 22:34:37 +0100

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.

Red Photo Contest

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 22:15:22 +0100

Wired.com came up with a red photo contest the other day. Readers could submit their best red picture and vote on others.

See: wired.com

The top 10 pictures are quite nice. When browsing through the entries it struck me how many faces the color red actually has. Red is often associated with agression and arousement. But some of these pictures are tranquil rather than dynamic. These pictures illustrate nicely that colors are not easily caught into cliches.

Back blogging

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 21:44:11 +0100

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....

Spike and Suzy

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 14:43:38 +0100

The other day my 8 year old son received a comic book. It's one of a series called 'Suske en Wiske' (aka 'Spike and Suzy' or 'Willy and Wanda'). It's quite famous in the Netherlands. I actually grew up with these comic books. I still own a pile of them. When I saw it, I was struck how the colors have changed since I was a kid. The style has remained practically unaltered, but boy have the colors come a long way... I took out an old copy from my closet and compared it to the recent one. There's a 30 year gap between the two. Here they are, the old one on top. The new colors are much more elaborate, much better structured. And they introduced the effects of lighting into the pictures. These days they use a lot more grey. But paradoxally this leads to clearer, brighter colors. In the old days many colors were competing to catch the eye of the reader. But no more. That makes makes for a much more tranquil overall image with just a few spots of color attracting attention. And look at how the figures nowadays become much darker in dimmed light and dark spaces. It makes the spatial arrangement much easier to grasp. All in all the design team did a great job. I'm impressed. So huge a difference while still preserving the style of the comic is quite a feat.

How does color affect space?

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:18:01 +0100

A reader asks: "Is there a book you could recommend that would explain how your eye perceives color in a room - what I mean by this is what effect does having a light color ceiling vs a dark one do to a room or how does painting one wall one color and the remaining walls another? I don't know if there are formulas for this process and was wondering if you had any ideas?" The workings of colors in a room are quite complex. I can't think of a book that explains it all for all circumstances. Light, surface color, shape and space together form our visual reality. I don't think you can seperate the color part from the rest. It follows that the effect of color very much depends on circumstances. This means that if you want to understand the effect of color in a room, you need to study it in unison with the specific circumstances. The way to do this is by making sketches and playing with cardboard models. I personally work a lot with photo prints, covered with transparant paper which I use as a base for sketches with coloring pencils. Even though I'm quite skilled at using Photoshop, I find that pencils are more direct and faster to work with to make a rough sketch. The sketches and models will show you quite clearly what happens with the space by using different colors. Doing this will also train your eyes to analyse a space very rapidly, to eventually make much of the sketchwork superfluous once you gain enough experience.

Calibrize

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:49:27 +0100

Check this out: Calibrize 2.0 Yesterday my company launched a new website to distribute a FREE color calibration utility. Calibrize is software that helps you to calibrate the colors of your monitor in three simple steps. Just download the software and follow the procedure to generate a reliable color 'profile' and adjust the colors of your monitor automatically.

Hundertwasser did it again

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:27:11 +0100

As if to stress his recusant character, the unruly Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser waited for seven years after his death to finish yet one more colorfull building. This is a hostel for kids who are seriously ill, but it looks like something from a fairy tale. I just love those colors and these shapes. This building is as organic and as far from geometry as it gets. I would probably hate it if it were my office building, but as a hostel for kids it couldn't have been better. The hostel is near a clinic in the south of Holland. The kids can stay there with their families during their treatment. Hundertwasser was assisted by the German architect Heinz Springmann who, unlike the late artist, is alive and well. Kudos to McDonald's inc. for making this possible through the Ronald McDonald charity. Pictures by Wouter Roosenboom.

374 Ikea colors

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 21:12:17 +0100

Here's a fascinating project by the artist Jason Salavon. He simplified each page in the Ikea catalogue into one solid color and combined them all into one lightbox. You can check his website for more interesting works of color.

Roman Colors

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:17:20 +0100

The Romans were masters in the art of murals, frescos. They were able to create the illusion of shape and space on a two dimensional surface. They often depicted landscapes or human figures. These were not flatly 'colored by number' in Greek style but showed elaborate shadows and highlights. The Romans were well aware of the influence of light on a color. Fresco detail from the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii Where the Greeks used one single color for skin, the Romans went to great lenghts to create an illusion of form and space. However, the illusions that were thus created, brought along some interesting paradoxes. Up till this very day there's a statue of emporer August in Rome. The emporer carries a metal cuirass, as usual in those days. While the statue is now completely white, research shows that originally it was completely painted. The metal cuirass was richly decorated with reliefs of war images. One would expect the cuirass to have been painted with some color to represent metal, including the reliefs. However, a recontruction of the original colors has shown that the reliefs ware painted in 'realistic' colors. But because the reliefs were metal, they should have been metal 'color'. It begs the question what is more 'real' in this case: the metal of the cuirass or the colors of images depicted in the reliefs.