Understanding Color

An Introduction for Designers

Linda Holtzschue

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118920794
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño gráfico

THE PERCEPTION, UNDERSTANDING, AND USES OF COLOR—EXPANDED AND REFRESHED

Understanding Color is an essential resource for those needing to become proficient in color for business applications. The peerless treatment of this critical subject is beautifully illustrated with real-world examples. Designers have turned to this guide for nearly a generation for its authoritative and accessible instruction. The knowledge contained in this book sets you apart from other designers by enabling you to:

• Contribute more effectively to discussions on color harmony, complete with a vocabulary that enables in-depth understanding of hue, value, and saturation
• Apply the most-up-to-date information on digital color to your projects
• Address issues involved when colors must be translated from one medium to another
• Troubleshoot and overcome today's most common challenges of working with color

Full-color images showcase real design examples and a companion website features a digital workbook for reinforcing color concepts. From theory and practical implementation to the business and marketing aspects, Understanding Color helps you gain a deep and discriminating awareness of color.

1
AN INTRODUCTION TO COLOR STUDY
The Experience of Color / Color Awareness / The Uses of Color / Color-Order Systems / Color Study

Color is essential for life.

—Frank H. Mahnke

Color is stimulating, calming, expressive, disturbing, exuberant, symbolic. It pervades every aspect of life, embellishes the ordinary, and gives beauty and drama to everyday objects. If black-and-white images bring the news of the day, color writes the poetry.

The romance of color exists for everyone, but color plays a far more important role for design professionals. Forms, colors, and their arrangement are the foundation elements of design, and of these, color is arguably the most powerful weapon in the designer's arsenal. A skilled colorist understands how colors are seen, when and why they seem to change, the variety of their meanings and suggestive powers—and how to apply that knowledge to enhance the marketability of products. Whether that product is a graphic design, a sweater, an airplane seat, a kitchen utensil, a laptop, a wedding cake, or anything else, color will play a great part in determining its success or failure in the consumer marketplace. For designers, color means business.

The Experience of Color

Color is, first, a sensory event. Every color experience begins as a physiological response to a stimulus of light. Colors of light are experienced in two very different ways. The colors on a monitor screen are seen as direct light. The colors of the real world—of printed pages, physical objects, and the surrounding environment—are seen as reflected light.

The perception of colors seen as direct light is straightforward: wavelengths of light reach the eye directly from a light source. The experience of real-world color is a more complex event. Real-world colors are seen indirectly, as light reflected from a surface. For tangible objects and printed pages, light is the cause of color, colorants (like paints, inks, or dyes) are the means used to generate color, and the colors that are seen are the effect.

Colors that are experienced as reflected light are unstable. Move a red object from one kind of illumination to another—from daylight to fluorescent lighting, for example—and its apparent color will undergo a noticeable shift. The same red paint applied to smooth plaster will not seem the same on rough stucco. A single color can appear as two or even more different colors simply by changing its placement against other colors. Two identical oranges, one laid on a red tablecloth and the other on a yellow one, will seem different: the first more yellow-orange, the other more red-orange.

Colors seen as direct light are more stable. As long as a particular wavelength of light reaching the eye does not shift, that color will be seen dependably as the same. But despite that stability, colors of light are not easily translated into real-world color. The color of a carpet underfoot is very different from that of its image on a screen, and each of these is different from its illustration on a printed page.

Finally, there is a human element to the instability of colors. Whether a color is seen as direct or reflected light, one person's perception of “true red” will be different from someone else's “true red.” Not only are colors themselves unstable, individuals' ideas about colors differ as well. And when colors are used symbolically, their meanings change in different cultures and in different situations.

With rare exceptions, work in the design industries today is done in images of light on a screen for products that will ultimately be produced as material goods or printed pages. Are the screen image and the actual product the same color? Can they be the same color? Which is the “true” color—the one on the screen or the one that is the tangible object? Is there such a thing as a “true” color at all?

Designers use color. Their concern is with effects, not with words, ideas, or causes. Understanding what is seen, and how and why it is seen—how colors work—is background knowledge that supports the art of color. Designers work with color every day in a comfort zone: a healthy mix of fact, common sense, and intuition. A skilled colorist exploits the instabilities of color and uses them to create interest and vitality in design.

We understand color in much the same way that we understand the shape of the earth. The earth is round, but we experience it as flat, and act according to that practical perception. Color is light alone, but it is experienced so directly and powerfully that we accept it as a physical entity. No matter what color technology is available, we believe our eyes. Ultimately, color problems in the design industries are solved with the human eye. Designers work with color from the evidence of their eyes.

Color Awareness

Color is sensed by the eye, but the perception of color takes place in the mind, and nearly always at an unconscious level. Colors are understood by their placement and their context. They are experienced at different levels of awareness depending on how and where they are seen. Colors may be perceived as two- or three-dimensional forms, as light, or as surroundings. Colors permeate the environment, are an attribute of objects, and communicate without words.

Environmental color is all-encompassing. Both the natural world and man-made environments immerse us in colors, whether they are the cold whites of Antarctica, the lush greens of tropical forests, the accidental color compositions of urban streets, or the controlled-color environments of architecture, landscape design, interior design, or theater design.

Surrounding colors have a powerful impact on the human body and mind, but most of the time they are experienced with an astonishing lack of awareness. They are noticed only when they become a focus of attention, like a beautiful sunset or a freshly decorated room. Even a stated awareness of color can be self-deceiving. Someone who expresses a dislike for green may nevertheless take enormous pleasure in a garden, describing it as a blue or yellow garden, when in fact the foliage is overwhelmingly green, with blue or yellow only a small part of the whole.

The colors of objects are perceived very directly. The separateness of an object allows a viewer to focus both eyes and mind on a single entity and single color idea. We are most consciously aware of color when it is an attribute of a defined object: a blue dress, a red car, a yellow diamond.

Figure 1–1. Environmental Color. Nature offers unrivaled displays of color.

Figure 1–2. Environmental Color. The gray of city streets is only a background for the brilliant colors of street life.

Figure 1–3. Object Color. Contemporary glass beads in many colors add brilliance and surprise to a timeless jewelry form. Necklace design and image courtesy of Lois Dubin.

Graphic colors are the colors of images: painted, drawn, printed, or on-screen. Graphein, the Greek root of the English word “graphic,” means both “writing” and “drawing.” Whether a graphic d...