Design and Colour

Jacquie Wilson

The colours of the spectrum

violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red

Colour range for questionnaire

black, white

violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red

Colour range 2 for questionnaire

black, white, silver, gold,

violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red

Product colour

• The final colour of a product on sale to the consumer is the end result of a complex interaction of knowledge, guesswork, practical constraint, and marketing skill.

The importance of colour

• Many researchers around the world are now recognising the importance of colour in order to reach increasingly sophisticated customers on a deeper level.

Some quotes about colour

• ‘emotions can be stirred by colour’ [Tucker, 1987]

• ‘whoever controls colour, controls the world’ [Woodhuysen, 1994]

• ‘when colour has a specific, predetermined function that acts to support the overall strategy, your marketing effort can do all you’ve designed it to do’ [Sharpe, 1974]

Factors influencing product choice in textiles and fashion

• Colour is the most important Then design, then handle, then price

• Therefore, it is the colour palette that is produced before anything else each season. It is colour that dictates the mood of a season.

What is colour?

• Light is part of the huge range of vibration energies called the electromagnetic spectrum. When some electromagnetic waves bounce off certain surfaces and hit your eye you see colour. Seeing different colours is caused by having light of different wave-lengths hit your eye. What you see is red, what causes it is light of a certain wavelength.

Colour perception

• In the 17th century the philosopher John Locke distinguished between what he called primary qualities like distance, weight and shape which are real and physical, and secondary qualities such as colour which are not really physical qualities.

The Physical Stimulus• Objects do not have any intrinsic colour

independent of a visual system to perceive it.

light

object

observer

What do we know light?• Samuel Johnson said, “we all know what light

is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”• Benjamin Franklin said, “about light I am in the

dark”• How fast is light? Speed of light in a vacuum

– approx 180,000 miles per second or 300,000 km/second

• What is it that travels? – Energy (we get warm in the sunlight and heat is a

form of energy)

• Light also carries momentum or “push”. – This momentum is extremely small but the push

from a powerful laser pointed upward can support a tiny glass ball.

• A wave or a particle?

Objects

Objects are generally coloured if they reflect certain wavelengths that fall upon them but absorb others.

wavelengths longshort

A red car, for example, looks red because it reflects only the longer wavelengths

How we “see” colour

• Colour is caused by physical qualities (wavelength) but the effects are in the mind. Red only looks red in your mind. An apt quote from the artist Wasily Kandinsky – “Colour is seen by the eye but perceived by the brain”.

Rods and cones

• In the retina, at the back of the eye, there are two different kinds of receptor cells which respond to the light focused on them by the eye’s lens. These are rods and cones. The rods are responsible for colourless vision in dim illumination while the cones operate at higher light levels and are responsible for colour perception.

Colours are wavelengths

• The colours you see correspond to different wavelengths of visible light. Violet is the shortest and red the longest of the visible wavelengths. Light from the sun contains all these wavelengths, but looks white to us.

How colour happens

• When a stream of photons (light) falls on the surface of an object (an apple, a piece of paper etc) several things may happen. The photons may – react with atoms in the object and

disappear - absorption – pass through to the other side –

transmission– bounce off in a new direction -

reflection or scattering

Absorption

• Absorption is what gives the object its colour. Everything around us absorbs light, but different things absorb different wavelengths. You see the wavelengths that are not absorbed. So something seen as red absorbs all the other wavelengths except red.

A multicoloured spectrum

• When a beam of white light is shone through a glass prism the various wavelengths are bent (refracted) by differing amounts. They spread out to form a multicoloured spectrum. The order of the colours is always the same violet, blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange and red. This was first done by Isaac Newton in the 1660s.

The colours of the spectrum

White light is split into its component hues

Colour vision

• Cones are responsible for colour vision, they are concentrated in the central part of the retina and work only in daylight.

Three types of cones

• Normal human colour vision has three types of cones: Red, green and blue. Each type of cone is most sensitive to a specific wavelength of visible light. However, the sensitivity of the cones overlap, so a particular wavelength of light may stimulate two types of cone.

How the brain interprets colour

• When a cone is stimulated, it sends a signal along the optical nerve to the brain. Different wavelengths of light stimulate the cones in different combinations, and the brain interprets these signals as colours.

How wavelengths of light send signals to the brain via cones

Yellow: Signal from green and red cones.

Turquoise: Signal from blue and green cones.

Grey: Medium size signal from blue, green and red cones.

Black: No signal from any cones.   White: A strong signal from all

three cones.

Metamerism

• Because we need light to see colour, the colour of an item will change depending on the light source. This effect is called metamerism.

Colour Communication• How can we adequately describe colour?• How can a colour be defined unambiguously?• Approximately how many colours are discernable to the human

visual system?• Can we impose some sort of systematic order to the naming of

colours?• How can the idea of a colour be communicated?• Can we specify colours precisely?• Which colour am I?

– Daybreak, Desert Glass, Sophisticated Lady, Surrender, Whimsical, Hepatica, Mignon, Nuncio, Nymphea, Pomp and Power

Verbal descriptions of colour - Precision

• Everyday use– 20-100 colour description terms cover most possible

needs.• Professional/artistic use

– At this level there is a need to define the colour specified.– Physical samples of the colour are often used to define

the colour precisely.• Scientific Colour Management

– All colours are given a precise NUMERIC colour definition. Samples can be measured to provide a precise specification.

Describing Colour

• The Desert Island Experiment (Judd, 1975)– Suppose a person with normal colour vision

and no experience of dealing with colours is idling away their time on a desert island, surrounded by a large number of pebbles of similar texture but having a wide variety of colours. Suppose they wanted to organise these pebbles in some orderly way, according to their colour. How can we describe colour in terms of what they might do?

Desert Island Experiment• One possible way would be for out experimenter to

think about colour in terms of the common names red, blue green etc and separate those out without hue – that is those that are white, grey or black. Thus they separate the chromatic pebbles from the achromatic ones.

• The observer may find that the achromatic pebbles could arranged in a logical order in a series going from white to light grey to dark grey to black. This arrangement in terms of lightness, provides a place for every achromatic pebble. (value, whiteness or blackness)

Desert Island Experiment• The chromatic pebbles differ from one another in several ways

not just by differences in lightness.• Our experimenter could separate them by hue, into different piles

they call red, yellow, green, and blue. Each pile may be subdivided as finely as they want, for example, yellow-green, green and blue-green piles.

• Each group of pebbles of a given hue could be separated by lightness just as the achromatic pebbles were. The red pebbles could be separated into a series staring with the lightest pinks and becoming gradually darker, ending with the dark cherry reds. Each red pebble would be equivalent in lightness to one of the grey pebbles in the achromatic series.

Red

YellowBlue

Yellow-Green

Blue-Green

Green

Green

Pinks

Light red

Medium red

Dark red

Very dark red

Desert Island Experiment

• But the pebbles also differ in another way other than lightness and hue. For example, a brick red could be compared to a tomato-red colour. They are the same hue (neither is yellower or bluer red than the other). They also have the same lightness. (being equivalent in lightness to the same medium-grey stone taken from the achromatic pebbles)

• This third kind of difference relates to how much the stones differ from grey – in crude terms how much colour they contain. The stones with a single hue and a single lightness that vary in their hue are said to have varying chroma.

Colour in language

• In 1969 research by Berlin and Kay led tem to claim that there were no more than eleven basic colour terms found in any human language, those colours being: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.

Berlin and Kay’s paradigm for the order in which colours are

learned• Berlin and Kay suggested that the order

in which colour terms enter language is not arbitrary, but runs in a specific sequence.

Berlin and Kay’s paradigm

• If a language has only two colours they are always white and black; if three colours, the one added is red; if a fourth is added, it will be either green or yellow; when a fifth is added, it will then include both green and yellow; the sixth added is blue; the seventh added is brown; and if an eighth or more terms are added, it or they will be purple, pink, orange, or grey.

Colour naming

• Describing colour is difficult. Just what colours do the following names refer to - vanilla, camel, beige and maroon?

• Given that the human eye (and brain) can distinguish between ten million colours, it becomes obvious that to describe colour experiences by name is imprecise.

Colour Order Systems

• In order to accurately describe or pin point colours a reference or colour system needs to be devised.

• Having discovered how to create a spectrum by directing a narrow beam of white light through a prism the first colour wheel was formed by Isaac Newton who took the two ends of his colour spectrum and bent it into a circle.

Newton’s colour wheel

Otto Runge’s colour sphere

• Newton's colour wheel evolved and changed over the centuries. In 1810 Otto Runge created a spherical model, with white at the north pole and black at the south pole and with Newton's colour circle forming its equator.

Ostwald and Munsell

• In 1915 Williem Ostwald devised his double cone colour solid. In the same year another system of colour notation was developed by Albert Munsell. This added steps to the constituent hues of Newton’s colour circle.

Munsell’s colour steps

• Munsell added colour steps to Newton’s seven spectrum colours

ruby, magenta, purple, violet, blue, cyan, turquoise, green, lime, yellow, orange, red

Munsell’s colour wheel

Munsell’s colour solid

• Munsell's second innovation was to allow his three-dimensional colour solid to respond in shape to the different potential strengths between hues.

Munsell’s colour solid

Munsell’s colour solid

• This created an asymmetrical colour solid. Munsell's colour solid when stripped back to basics becomes a colour tree. This can be explained in three dimensions. In Munsell terms these are hue, value and chroma.

Munsell’s colour tree

Hue, value and chroma

• Hue is the colour of a colour i.e. its redness, greenness or yellowness (round the solid).

• Value refers to the amount of lightness or darkness (running up and down).

• Chroma refers to the saturation of a colour or its colour strength (from the middle out).

Hue

• Hue is the name of the colour family to which a colour belongs. An orange-red which would have more red than orange, would belong to the family of reds, and so its hue would be considered red.

Value

• The value (also known as brightness) of a colour is how dark or light a colour is. The value of any colour can be altered by adding white (which raises the value), or black (which lowers the value). Tint – colour lightened by the addition of white. Shade – colour darkened by the addition of black.

Chroma

• Chroma (also known as intensity or saturation) refers to a colour's purity. The stronger or brighter a colour is, the higher its chroma. The weaker or more mixed a colour is, the lower is it's chroma. You can alter the chroma of a colour by adding white, grey, another colour or black.

• Pastel colours are heavily tinted colours which all have low chroma.

Colour reference systems

• In a colour reference system each colour in a colour model has a numerical colour code, which can be used to reproduce exactly the colour intended. With colour codes instructions can be passed to computers and other machines. Colour models make modern colour printing, computer graphics and image processing possible.

 

A colour model for colour referencing

Additive colour mixing

• Thomas Young (1773-1829) discovered that combining lights of just three of the seven colours found in the spectrum; red, indigo and green produced white light. These three colours are primary colours and by mixing these three additive primaries in differing amounts of coloured light any colour in the rainbow can be created.

Additive colour mixing

• Young also realised that by combining any two of the three additive primaries gave one of the other colours seen in the prism. These were called secondary colours. Additive colour mixing is the mixing of coloured light.

Additive colour mixing

Subtractive colour mixing

• In subtractive colour mixing the principle is exactly the opposite. The subtractive primary colours are cyan, yellow and magenta. When mixed together they subtract from the light to produce black. When different pairs of the subtractive primaries are mixed the colours red, green and blue are produced.

Subtractive colour mixing

Partitive colour

• Tiny dots of pure colour produce a visual colour as shown below at left. A close-up view shows you what you are actually looking at. A distanced view shows the effect of a visual colour that isn't really there. The human eye mixes these colours together visually to produce the effect.

Partitive colour mixing

Screen printing - paper

• Modern screen printing is another example of a partitive system. Angled screens of pure transparent colour ink produce the illusion of colour hues in printing.

Screen printing on paper

Using colour - colour wheels

• A colour circle, based on red, yellow and blue, is traditional in the field of art.

PRIMARY COLOURSred, yellow and blue

• In traditional colour theory, these are the 3 pigment colours that cannot be mixed or formed by any combination of other colours. All other colours are derived from these 3 hues.

SECONDARY COLOURSgreen, orange and purple

• These are the colours formed by mixing the primary colours.

TERTIARY COLOURSyellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green

and yellow-green.

• These are the colours formed by mixing primary and secondary colours.

Using colour - colour harmony

• Harmony can be defined as a pleasing arrangement of parts, whether it be music, poetry, colour, or even an ice cream sundae.

Harmony

• When something is not harmonious, it's either boring or chaotic. At one extreme is a visual experience that is so bland that the viewer is not engaged. The human brain will reject under-stimulating information. At the other extreme is a visual experience that is so overdone, so chaotic that the viewer can't stand to look at it.

Colour harmony

• Colour harmony delivers visual interest and a sense of order.

• In summary, extreme unity leads to under-stimulation, extreme complexity leads to over-stimulation. Harmony is a dynamic equilibrium.

A colour scheme based on analogous colours

A colour scheme based on complementary colours

Complementary colours

• Complementary colours are any two colours which are directly opposite each other, such as red and green and red-purple and yellow-green. In the previous illustration, there are several variations of yellow-green in the leaves and several variations of red-purple in the orchid. These opposing colours create maximum contrast and maximum stability.

A colour scheme based on nature

• Nature provides a perfect base for colour combinations. In the previous illustration red, yellow and green create a harmonious design, regardless of whether this combination fits into a technical formula for colour harmony.