Design Practice: Systematic Colour ( 1 & 2 )

Part 1

Knowing how to use colour responsibly is essential, within Graphic Design. The problem with colour however is that it's very subjective. How green is a blue, etc. We can't always be sure what we see is actually what we're thinking we are seeing. Below is a chart the wavelengths of colour only our eye perceives, red, green and blue.

'The eye contains two kinds of receptors: rods and cones. While the rods convey shades of gray, the cones allow the brain to perceive color hues. Of the three types of cones, the first is sensitive to red-orange light, the second to green light and the third to blue-violet light. When a single cone is stimulated, the brain perceives the corresponding color. That is, if our green cones are stimulated, we see "green". Or if our red-orange cones are stimulated, we see "red". If both our green and red-orange cones are simultaneously stimulated, our perception is yellow.The eye cannot differentiate between spectral yellow, and some combination of red and green. The same effect accounts for our perception of cyan, magenta, and the other in-between spectral colors.Because of this physiological response, the eye can be "fooled" into seeing the full range of visible colors through the proportionate adjustment of just three colors: red, green and blue.'

Don't trust your eyes, they can be fooled.

This is the colour wheel we were mostly taught within school, giving us the perception that this is the only way that colours can be mixed, but of course that's wrong. Colour we were taught within school was subtractive, there also exists additive. Subtractive colour exists only in print, so fabric, metal, etc. However additive colour exists only with light, monitors, lights and web. So two examples of the colour modes that use these would be RGB & CYMK.

Subtractive colour darkens the more you add into it, like with primary school paint, adding red and blue together would get purple, but adding yellow would turn it into a murky dull colour. This is because the more that's added into it the more the colour is subtracted from it. Where as with additive colour, if you were to do the same and add red and blue you would get magenta, but by adding in green you would then end up with white, instead of black.

Part 2

Chromatic value is the overall value of a colour, below they are all the same apart from the change in hue. They're all have equal tones and saturation.

Hue is the colour, of a colour. Where as what defines the rest of it is the luminance (how bright or dark it is) and it's saturation. Within luminance however, there is shade, tone and tint. Depending on the chromatic value of the colour. A shade is a darkened colour where as a tint is a lightened chroma. The tone is the saturation of it, it has less tone the more desaturated it is.

Our perception of colour can also be changed by other colours, below is an example of this.

The pink and orange above here are our starting colours, then below adding to the right a red-orange then makes us perceive the orange box to be paler than below, and it also makes the pink seem a lot more saturated by the outer orange on the right.

Adding yet another colour around these, the crimson red. This is perceived differently on both sides even though it's all one solid block. We see it as a lot darker on the left side while lighter on the right. The colours again change within this solid ring of colour. This is just an example of how our can be easily fooled to perceive colours differently when surrounded by other colours and it also shows why I as a designer have to be careful with what colours I choose to work together.

If you want to work with colour in design it has to be Systematic.

In order to communicate to other people the colours you want to use, you need a systematic way to be able to work with to make sure whatever colour you pick will be the exact same on their end, for this you need a colour matching system. One of the most popular one of these that exists is Pantone. It's used mostly for printing, it's used as a visual reference so both ends know exactly what the outcome is going to be when it's printed, they'll get that colour.

Pantone can matched to almost every colour, even from things that exist within nature, as seen above. If something has been manmade and printed, or colour exists within it. It's possible to match Pantone to it and find it's colour out. There even exists a digital tool by pantone to find them out 'Capsure'. But the main way you would find out a colour through pantone would be to use a colour swatch with a printed sample of every colour.

For the session we were to bring in 15 objects that were all of the same colour, I'd been given the colour red. Below are the objects I brought in.

As a task with all these different objects we were to arrange them to create a big colour wheel, putting our redest reds in the middle while putting the reddish-violet to the right and reddish-orange to the left. This created the below, with the objects all in single file it created a really cool colour-wheel I have to admit. It was quite cool the see how what I thought was red red wasn't at all. They're not that red at all, it's only the redest object that I can see without comparing I wouldn't be able to tell.

After that we were to gather the lighest and darkest red, the brightest and dullest reds and after that the most violet to the most orange red, as well as the red-est red.

Then we had to discover what they were all in terms of the Pantone colour matching system, the Coke can (Most Red) was Pantone 187c Solid Coated. - Coated is for the objects that have a shine to them, or aren't matte.