You wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror and you decide how you look or how you
feel mostly dependent upon color. Color can effect you both physiologically and
psychologically. You can make somebody feel something with color. Piss them off. Yeah. Color is
everywhere. It's just pervasive all throughout our lifestyles, our culture. Whether or not
you're verbalizing it, you're actually saying something to the world: "This is me
because I'm wearing this color."
Most people know color.
You know color, you use it every day. You interact with it. That's how you make your way
through the world and the color perceptors in your eyes are rods and cones.
Cones start with a "C" and they perceive color, your rods perceive
grays. Color theory, as a definition, it's more the mixtures and implementation of
combinations of color.
Color is the umbrella under which hue, value, and chroma rest. Hue being the
distinction between different colors on a wheel from red to red orange, so to speak.
Value being light and dark and chroma being bright and dull. The color wheel is a
tool that helps us talk about the physical phenomena of light and how we
perceive it and how we ultimately implement it in designs and the combinations.
We now teach more based on the harmonies and contrasts and how it relates to how
you utilize color. So students learn about complimentary colors which tend to be
opposite one another and clash which is just two colors but they're one-off of
complimentary. I think that there's been many different types of wheels and so I
say to students nowadays, I don't mind if you invent your own wheels with
your own nuanced understandings of color because you're a different human than
whoever came before you and who knows what you'll come up with invents the future
that we haven't even seen yet.
So, you get a lot more interaction with color nowadays on multiple levels and
people are aware of this. They know that they're affected by it soulfully and not just
mentally. And you should take that strength in your soul to build your own
understanding because it is so personal and you change.
Color, for me, is what I call sort of a silent language or an emotional language
that we all sort of intuitively know how to speak. As we see color we start to
associate it with different things in our lives. We have three different types
of associations: universal,
cultural, and individual.
Individual color preference is a really interesting dynamic. I think color
trends play a part in color preference. Quite often though, it may be associated with an
experience.
There are definitely universal aspects to color and they are usually the
physiological ones. So red is definitely the one that increases your heart rate when
you first see it. It makes you want to move. There's some studies that actually say
that you'll walk faster, you'll eat more, you'll talk more when you're, let's say,
in a red room than any other color. One great example is you think of the red carpet.
Well, there's a reason why the red carpet is the red carpet and that's because it keeps the
traffic flowing.
Where, conversely, when you see blue the opposite will happen. So you become
more calm and relaxed.
I think the one that is most interesting is the cultural differences.
For the most part it's usually a learned response. So when you're very young you
might think of brown as dirty and earthy but, as time goes on, you learn to
adjust those associations. So, all of a sudden, when espresso and coffee became a whole
new trend, brown took on a whole new association. When we start to think of
things like recycling or environmental concerns it's natural for us to
think of green. So we develop different types of associations that we share
with other human beings and, as we grow, those become more and more meaningful to us.
I've gone back through the twentieth century and and I found that there were some
ebbs and flows of color and it's just an evolution of a shit not a revolution.
Color is not the place where I look
first. It's the why behind it; the economic, the social, the political, the
technological, environmental influences. They're all the drivers of
why color is always evolving and revolving.
With the economic issues that we've had in recent years, people gravitate to safe colors,
grounded colors rooted in the past and rooted into the ground.
So you bring up, what we call, organic colors and as we get familiar with
that, there comes a time when we need a pick me up. So take the familiar and just add a
little accent of something new and give you a totally new look. Here we were
with the depression. People were so depressed they needed to put color back in their
lives so they colored glass and that's where depression glass comes from. Go back to the
Sixties and we saw the psychedelic colors coming in because of the drug
culture. Just pattern on pattern, color on color and it was just a kaleidoscope of
everything happening all at once. And in the Seventies we had rest for a decade.
We browned out and,
remember the decoupage and almond and beige and browns of the
nineteen-seventies. So, in forecasting, we look at those kinds of trends, what are
constant, but also something new and different for the forecast in the future.
As like a gif
artist you can only use two hundred and fifty six colors. I think the restriction is really
cool. It's like something common that all gif makers have to think about when they're making a gif.
You work within this resolution
that, in today's high-def,
you never see so it almost gave it an aesthetic just because it was so
constrained. It's minimalism.
It lets the viewer fill in the blanks.
It's communicating with people via imagery. We like to experiment with
different types of film. That's why you never see the
same looking portrait
shot. You get like different colors that you wouldn't get with your perfect camera.
Like a VHS camera brings out the oranges and
makes everything super-saturated. You almost can't fake that kind of color because
of the way the colors interact with each other.
You can always make a rainbow move
because there's so many colors to cycle through.
You don't even have to be choosy on the colors as long as
you have all of them in there. I'm like a black and white fiend. You know, like, the
conscious decision of not using color and
making it work. Black and white is bold. But then you throw in, like, a little red.
It'll make that red pop just that much more. Variety, you know, like if you
see our page. If it was all color or all black and white, it wouldn't
have much impact.
When it comes to colors, though, you want to think of like what colors match before you even
worry about what colors you can't use.
And like you can make anything as long as you make it look intentional.
It's like a taste of nostalgia.
It's also like the challenge of trying to convey an idea in these blocks.
Usually people think picking the color for something is pretty simple but it
actually gets complex pretty quickly.
Color's emotive and I don't think it ever stays static and so you're
looking at color in a different way of accenting it rather than changing it abruptly.
It's just that you have to learn to identify it and codify the language: how do I arrange them
and how do I speak about that arrangement so that other people understand what I'm creating or doing.
Use black and white sometimes.
Colors are just fun, man. I just want to, like,
inspire people to make fun stuff.