Issue 04/10
By / Cortney Cassidy
Year 2020
“Someone who speaks of the character of a color is always thinking of just one particular way it is used.”
The color you see is only the color you think you see. Your interpretation of light landing on a surface depends on your frame of reference and your frame of mind—both can be altered at the speed of light. When I’m overwhelmed in a crowd I distract myself by looking for as many red-colored objects as I can. Red is not typically a calming color, especially if you’re staring at miles of brake lights in traffic, but it’s really easy for me to see. Red becomes the most dominant thing on my mind.
Humans have used red since the neolithic era, as seen in the prehistoric cave drawings; When developing languages, red is typically the color named first after black and white. It’s now used so frequently in advertising—because it attracts the most attention—that people have learned to ignore it. The ad industry has successfully made a highly visible color…invisible.
In grade school, I learned that yellow was the most soothing to color with when I brought the expensive markers I wasn’t allowed to use at home to school. I colored in a picture of Paddington wearing a raincoat well enough for my teacher to hang it on the wall for parent-teacher day. The comfort I experienced from quietly meeting the black lines with a high-contrast yellow, disappeared as I waited for my mother to find me out. In her piece commemorating a decade of internet colors, designer Laurel Schwulst reflects that “yellow tries to show you the way” in Google Maps.
“The “normal” sighted and the color-blind do not have the same concept of color-blindness”
Colors can be hard to see. To the chemist John Dalton, red, orange, yellow, and green all appeared the same. The rest of the color spectrum appeared as gradients of blue and purple. Dalton went on to write the first scientific paper on the subject of color blindness, “Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours” in 1798. Ludwig Wittgenstein — the Austrian philosopher who popularized the rabbit-duck illusion as a means of describing two different ways of seeing — wrote in Remarks on Colour, **that “not every deviation from the norm must be a blindness.” He pointed out that the “normal” sighted and the color-blind do not have the same concept of color-blindness.
People with decreased ability to differentiate between hues experience color through a series of judgments. My colleague, for example, explained that for red, green, and brown to function for him, he has to consider their context. These judgments may be “wrong” when they need to be “right”; Like the order of a traffic light, the alternating red and green battery light on a vape pen, or the order of a color legend matching the clockwise color placement in a pie chart. “If one says ‘red’ and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds,” wrote the artist and educator Josef Albers. We see fifty different reds because we each perceive and experience color differently.
“A dress can look black and blue under yellow light and white and gold in blue light.”
Colors can change depending on the nature of surfaces, like the atmospheric oxidation of the Statue of Liberty’s plating from shiny copper to verdigris (a bluish-green patina). In 1906, the Army Corps of Engineers vetoed a proposal from the United States Congress to restore the statue, concluding that the patina protecting the underlying metal from corrosion “softened the outlines, and made it beautiful.” We can see those softened outlines because light helps us discern forms. I find Vantablack—one of the darkest known substances, absorbing 99.96% of visible light—unsettling. As Kassia St Clair explains in The Secret Lives of Color, “black is an expression of light, in this case, it’s absence.” My eyes hunt for the surface, and Vantablack leaves nothing to see.
White surfaces reflect and scatter visible light, and according to Wittgenstein “very few people have seen pure white.” In the essay “In Praise of Shadows” on traditional Japanese aesthetics, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote that “western paper turns away light, while [Japanese] paper seems to take it in, to envelope it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.” If you take a piece of computer paper, that you know is white in its normal surroundings, and place it next to snow, the paper may appear grey. A white can be light grey in poor lighting or a light grey in good lighting. Or a dress can look black and blue under yellow light and white and gold in blue light. In full sunlight, the petals of a red flower appear bright red against duller green leaves. At dusk, the red flowers become darker while blue flowers appear brighter than they did in full daylight. This effect is called the Purkinje shift.
“Even our ready-made digital palettes are predetermined for us by the choices of both software and hardware manufacturers.”
Albers based his career on studying these kinds of shifts in color. In his book Interaction of Color, first published in 1963, he created color theory exercises that could make “colors lie”—as Tamara Shopsin put it in her essay “Homage to an Homage of an Homage.” By itself, a color appears dominant, but when placed next to an even stronger hue, we can see its more diminished true nature. Sixty years before Interaction of Color, the artist and historian Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published color studies in her forgotten book, Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color. Her work predicted trends that wouldn’t occur for several decades, like the concentric square format of Albers’s Homage to the Square.
In “On Color,” Sillman notes that most oil painters can tell the difference between colors from their weight alone, but that also means we’re “somewhat doomed to the palette provided by manufacturers.” Even our ready-made digital palettes are predetermined for us by the choices of both software and hardware manufacturers. (Or whoever we borrow from when using the eyedropper tool.) “When one becomes infatuated with the seven [spectral] colors, the mind is easily distracted,” wrote Masanoba Fukuoka, in his manifesto One-Straw Revolution. One of the most important organic farmers of the twentieth century, Fukuoka believed that viewing the colors of the world with “no-mind” — a state that recognizes the insufficiency of intellectual knowledge — helps one see the color of the colorless as color.
A flat gray surface can come to life through its small modulations of shading, which requires a visual sensitivity to tonal differences. The act of arranging the subtle differences is like arranging lengths of sticks or consecutive numbers, according to Wittgenstein, who once asked, “To what extent can we compare black and white to yellow, red, and blue?”. To use his own words in response, “Colors are the children of light, and light is their mother.” Notably, Vanderpoel also called color “the music of light.” Black and white, yellow, red, and blue preserve their relationship with light through the scales of tones between their lightest and darkest. The continuous scale does not change in saturation, but changes in brilliance. As all colors we can and cannot see differ depending on their surface, surrounding, and our state of mind—they will always in some way share their brilliance.
Issue 09/12
By / Zil Shah
Year 2023
“We are subconsciously shifting our color associations from the real world to the digital world”
At its core, this article astutely highlights the nuanced subjectivity inherent in the perception of color. “The color you see is only the color you think you see”, it compels us, as UI/UX designers, to acknowledge that the colors we incorporate into digital interfaces are not universally fixed; rather, they manifest within the ever-evolving realm of individual interpretation. This revelation encourages us to create experiences that align with the diverse perspectives of our users, embracing the artistry of adaptability.
I believe it’s widely known that colors have a complex history of symbolism that is influenced not only by their cultural, emotional, and psychological associations but also by the particular context in which they are used. In the article, numerous references were made related to this, but the one that stood out to me was a reference to Laurel Schwulst’s work, where she reflects on how “yellow tries to show you the way in Google Maps”. I think this perfectly highlights the significant evolution of colors and technology, demonstrating how we are subconsciously (or through heavy user research) shifting our color associations from the real world to the digital world.
The article's exploration of colorblindness and the varying perceptions of color among individuals was vital as well. In the spirit of inclusivity, it encourages us to ensure that our designs are accessible to all, transcending the limitations of perception. We are prompted to incorporate alternative cues and clarity within our interfaces to cater to the diverse needs of our users.
The ‘Purkinje Shift’; the concept of changes in brightness and color perception in different lighting conditions, was quite intriguing. I wonder if this is why we adopted dark and light modes for digital interfaces. Moreover, the comment towards digital designers and their usage of a “ready-digital palette” was interesting to see from an article that is only two years old, and while I relate to the appreciation of man-made colors, we have advanced so much within technology, that the mixing of digital colors using gradients on Illustrator or the different brushes on Procreate is a form of beauty in itself.