Planetary Color

Color matters in art and design but it also matters in science. Especially to scientists looking for extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, which lie outside of our local solar system. With predictions now topping out between 100 and 400 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy, and each planet a potential source for extraterrestrial life, scientists are eager to learn more about them. The problem? Well thats two fold. 

First, their distance from Earth is an immense hurtle, the nearest known specimen being 4.37 lights years away. So even with the use of today most advanced telescopes the planets are still tiny specs in the night sky. The second and perhaps more daunting problem is their proximity to the nearby star makes them especially hard to detect. With the star giving off so much light, the reflected light from the planet, and thus our means of detecting it, gets washed out. 

How is this sovled? Well initially scientists could only tell if a star had planets at all by looking at the star itself. They checked for wobbles in the stars rotation, caused by the gravity of orbiting planets pulling the star this way or that. This revealed lots of gas giants similar to Jupiter because they were massive enough to give the star a good yank. That was a good starting point, but astrophysicists are rarely satisfied with first tries, and recently the astronomical tool kit has gotten more advanced. Now astrophysicists are working on direct detection techniques. This is where color comes in. Using a system laughably similar to holding your hand up to shade your eyes, scientists are now learning to block out the stars light to see Earth sized planets, tucked closer to the star in the zone most habitable for life. And once they can image the planet itself with minimized interference from the star, they can take a picture of the exoplanets spectrum, all the light it reflects. But what can the color of a planet tell us? In an article on the NASA Astrophysics Data System one Dr. Traub summarizes why color is important:

The color of an extrasolar planet is an important property because, for the case of direct detection, color is likely to be the first post-detection quantity to be measured... Color carries considerable information on planetary properties.

But what kind of information can color carry? What does the dominate color and the full spectrum of the planet detected tell us? For familiarity, lets think about our two closest planetary neighbors: Venus and Mars.

Venus

Mars via Wikipedia

While the surface of Venus is similar to the moon, when viewed from space its obscured by a thick blanket of muddy yellow of clouds. Without the need for chemical tests, the yellow tint reveals an atmosphere saturated with sulfur dioxide. That color chemical signature alone tells all about the conditions of the planet. Acid rains, green house effects, and molten temperatures make Venus fascinating but not likely to harbor life. Mars is a similar story. Its strong rust red color was our first clue that the surface would be saturated with iron oxide. Just like for our nearby neighbors, the colors themselves carry with them the chemical information that help scientists build models of these far away planets. From simple color spectrum data they may be able to determine if the planet has liquid water, breathable air, or the potential for life all from light years away.

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio

- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

Cyan

Color in the built environment around us sometimes goes unseen   With rich luminescent high definition screens at every turn we can't ignore the visual  impact technological devices  have on our daily lives. Thinking about screen color in our environment sends us straight to a ubiquitous culprit. Swiping on the nearest smart phone causes  fields of green and blue icons to appear. 

What if we thought of these screens as an environment? Not a space for our bodies to hang out but somewhere our eyes and minds spent a lot of time, especially on social network sites. There are 16 million possible colors on the web. And while lots of different colors are used around the web, our social environments, the coffee shops of the internet, seem to be self selecting a cooling cyan. 

This infographic from Infochimps  tells an interesting tale of cyan on Twitter. The length of the dripping colors show hows many twitter profile background pictures primarily use that hue. The graphic shows that over half of the users on this social site chose a cyan themed background. 

But why are we choosing  cyan?  If we research color psychology, turquoise, a cousin of cyan, is   defined as a hue to help with focus and concentration. Cyan can enhance clear thinking  and support one in making  well thought out decisions. Maybe in a sea of constant chatter we are crowd sourcing a color that calms the storm and recharges our waning energy. Color psychology also claims that cyan and turquoise can make people more emotionally aloof. 

Or is Twitter's corporate color the big influence? Could the twitter fail whale  be communicating subliminal messages? 

We hope you will start noticing the palettes in social networking and consider how they influence your psyche.

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio

- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

Colored Concrete

"This Hawaiian kitchen with blue floor, designed by Michael K. Smith, is bright and fun."
 via Apartment Therapy via Katiedid 

When we get to coloring personal spaces,  floors sometimes get ignored.  Typical floor solutions like tile, carpet and hardwood are an investment  to install.  There can be a reluctance to change from a traditional material  to the contemporary look of dyed concrete or opt for a painted floor.  For those people willing to explore finish options, many great color solutions are out here. 

A shining blue floor via Quelle Horreur

The rich navy mottling grounds this room. The space has the visual comfort of an old faded pair of blue jeans. This shot is by  by Petra Bindel from latest issue of Elle Decoration via Solid Frog. 

This painted not stained version of a concrete floor is by designer  Windsor Smith on the House of Turquoise blog

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio

- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

Site Specific Color

Gabriel Dawe's Plexus via Colossal

At Colour Studio approximately 45% of our projects are for new construction.   The balance of our  our work is creating color schemes for spaces that have already been built. Our colors become site specific to each individual environment.   Each project is unique and the color has to be tailored to consider the architecture, tasks and functions that will happen in the space,  demographic of the users,  cultural color affinities and  the geographic location.

This week we found two artists who are also making architectural site-specific color interventions. While color designers generally use paints and other material finishes to bring color to a project these artists are using two interesting materials: thread and stickers.

Gabriel Dawe's Plexus via the artist

Gabriel Dawe, originally from Mexico City, made these textile installations to explore the interconnections between fashion and architecture as different kinds of human shelter. Dawe's installations are made using individual strands of colored thread. The arrangement of the threads creates three dimensional color gradients that hang in the air like a cloud.

The perimeter warm white of the spaces allows the color stand out visually, as though color from the walls sprung into the air. The volumetric color draws attention to the architectural spaces we usually don't see: ceilings, support poles and the empty space of stairways.

Gabriel Dawe's Plexus via the artist

The second project is by Yayoi Kusama,  a Japanese artist and writer.  Her project also starts with stark white spaces, but where Dawe's uses real world spaces Kusama makes these white rooms from scratch. She then invited the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art visitors, children especially, to plaster the walls, floor and all the furniture with thousands of multicolored stickers. The project transforms the childhood urge to draw on the walls in to a communal color celebration. 

Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room

Where Dawes color clouds revealed interstitial spaces in architecture Kusama's Obliteration Room, asks another interesting question about architectural spaces: where is the divide between the space itself and objects inside that space? With the color of the stickers bleeding over every surface indiscriminate of wall, floor, piano or couch the distinct outlines and division between foreground and background are well obliterated.

Yayoi Kusama's Obliteration Room

 Color  can be applied in a multitude of ways  to change the way we think about our spaces.

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio
- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

The Book of Color

Working with and thinking about color is often a 2 dimensional on-screen exercise. When Colour Studio is working to design color for an architectural elevation or  on a floor plan our  creative staff has spent hours staring at sliders and numbers  tweaking and adjusting. Color starts out looking like this:

But artist Tauba Auerbach has inflated that flat field in to the RGB Colorspace Atlas.The atlas is several 8 in cube hard bound books which, when the pages are turned, fades through each color axis. The atlas contains every printable color.

The RGB Colorspace Atlas | Image by Brittany Schall

The Atlas makes tangible and manually accessible something we usually only experience with our eyes and the intermediary of color theory. These objects transform color in to a physical presence in space. Replacing the obsession with indexical color numbers like the hex code fdfcf3  the atlas relies on an older slower form of discovery: browsing.   Designboom describes the details of the collaboration:

"American artist Tauba Auerbach presents the 8 x 8 x 8-inch hard-back cubes illustrating the RGB color scheme in a page-by-page medium. A digital offset print on paper with airbrushed cloth cover and book edges create a colorful reference volume of all the colors in existence. the special binding was co-designed by the artist herself in collaboration with Daniel E. Kelm, and were printed at Wide Awake Garage, an independent bookbinder."

RGB COLORSPACE ATLAS - Blue Axis from Jonathan Turner on Vimeo.
This is a simulation of one volume in a set of three books by Tauba Auerbach.
each volume / 3632 pages
2011
Animation by Jonathan Turner

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio
- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

Pink and Blue

South Korean Artist JeongMee Yoon's The Pink and Blue Projects

One day last week, when brainstorming ideas about gender and color, the question arose : "Why pink and blue?" We have heard the saying so many times it becomes ingrained. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. But where did that idea come from and when?

 According to Smithsonian Magazines Jeanne Maglaty, "Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out." Because "pink was once a color associated with masculinity, considered to be a watered down red and held the power associated with that color".  When gendered color for babies started,  the roles were switched. . The Mary Sue, a blog on girl geek culture, found this gem that appeared in the June 1918 issue of Earnshaw's Infants’ Department, a trade publication:

“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

Today's pink/blue assignments were not solidified until the 1940s when , and it could easily have gone the other way. Childerns clothes started out far more gender and color neutral. Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America has studied the history of childern's clothing for 30 years.

"It’s really a story of what happened to neutral clothing. For centuries... children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. [It was] a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached"

Color Prefrances via KISSmetrics

But perhaps ironically when asked women almost never chose pink as their favorite color. This graphic was made using data from a study done in 2003. It compared the color preferences for various demographic using 232 people from 22 countries. The graphs are strikingly similar with one exception: 23% of women chose purple as their favorite color. If instead of using the tired pink and blue distinction we went with each genders color preferences boys would still be wearing blue and girls would be wearing blue with purple socks.

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio
- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio

History of the Color Wheel

Via Flickr Hive Mind

There are a plethora of beautiful and inventive color wheels online. They are a magnet for creative thinking because of the instant recognition in different formats, like for example the circle of felted acorns above. But what is a color wheel and where did they come from?

Newtons Color Circle via Wikimedia Commons

A color wheel is essentially a visual organization of hues. "Color circles have been used to describe associations of colors from medieval times, but the first known example of the representation of hue in the form of a wheel, or circle, is traced to Sir Isaac Newton; whose keen mind was for some time focused on the nature of light and color." (via Lines and Colors). Newton was the first person to prove that white light was made up of colored light. He used two prisms to refract white light in to a rainbow and then re-consolidate the rainbow back in to white light. His color circle was first published in his book Opticks in 1704. His color wheel was unlike modern color wheels as he maintained the proportions of the spectrum.

"[Newton] divided his colour wheel in musical proportions round the circumference... Each segment was given a spectral colour, starting from red at DE, through orange, yellow, green, blew [sic], indigo, to violet... The centre of the circle, at O, was presumed to be white. Newton went on to describe how a non-spectral colour, such as z, could be described by its distance from O and the corresponding spectral colour, Y." A color quality that today we call saturation.

But the idea of organizing color was more than a scientific curiosity. It had real economic repercussions. "Locating and describing the natural order of color would also have a clear significance for eighteenth-century color-based manufacturers. Knowledge of the number of basic colors would suggest how best to create others. The economic benefits of a limited palette demonstrated in color-making practices—notably textile dyeing and printing, and enamel painting—would thus be extended further." (Via Sarah Lowengard) But color palettes, "primary" colors and color names differed between professions, manufacturers, and countries. Colors identifications even differed depending on materials: paint or fabric? light or dye?

Since the color circle was first used it has been criticized for its total lack of subtractive color mixing, the fact the it doesn't match up with the spectrum, and that it distorts color theory and instead aims for visual symmetry. Modern scientific classifications of color have moved to chromaticity diagrams., many of which can be seen over at this Wiki list. Which while more accurate have failed to inspire many creative re-makings.

 For a very well researched and in-depth history of this color system please read Sarah Lowengards The creation of Color in Eighteenth-century Europe. The writing is pleasant and interesting.

- Emily Eifler, Writer, Colour Studio
- Jill Pilaroscia, Principal, Colour Studio