We use color in a thousand unconscious ways every day. While standing on a train platform on your way to work: "Please stand behind the yellow safety corridor." While shopping: "All blue tags are 50% off. Today only." While browsing online: "Click the red button to subscribe." While driving: "The light is green." We understand color in our environment almost without thinking, but what if you saw the world in shades of grey? Every color reduced to a monochromatic gradient. You would see only in texture and never in the rich high definition that color gives the world. But it wouldn't be just an aesthetic problem. Our urban worlds are designed with color as an organizing principle for everything from safety and navigability to brand identification and work flows.
That was the problem for the British born artist Neil Harbisson. Raised in Catalan Harbisson has a condition called a chromatopsia. It is a genetic problem that causes the brain to be unable to perceive color at all (not to be confused with monochromacy in which patients can perceive colors but cannot distinguish between them). The persons brain instead sees the world like a black and white movie, and much like long exposure time on a camera can let in too much light and ruin the image, the brighter the light surrounding the person the whiter and blurrier the world would become.
Harbisson speaking at TED
In an effort to get around his condition Harbisson, in collaboration with computer scientist Adam Montandon, became a cyborg. The team created a color sensor that Harbisson wore hovering over his forehead like a computerized antennae. The sensor then sends a signal to a chip on the back of his neck and then using bone resonance sends a different frequency to his ears for every color the sensor sees. This whole unit became know as the Eyeborg.
TED Idea Visualization on the Eyeborg
The process was slow at first requiring him to memorize the individual notes for each color, but over time hearing color become second nature and he even began to dream in color, his brain adding the electronic notes to his dreams when the software and sensor were not even connected. The device became more that just assistive technology but an extension of Neil Harbisson's brain. He became a true cyborg. He now hears the music of color everywhere, supermarkets, art galleries, and even on his plate. He no longer just eats grey food but instead get to compose songs as he eats. He even dresses in cords. If you want to hear Harbisson talk more about his experience as a cyborg listen to his TED talk.
Not many people have had the sensory expanding experience of hearing their colors yet but if you became a cyborg tomorrow what sense would you want to augment? Tasting music? Feeling textures for temperature? Hearing color? Tell us below!
Instagram is overflowing with beautiful, thoughtful images from thousand of feeds, but with so many choices its often hard to know who to follow. So to help our readers amp up the color in their Instagram streams here are 5 fantastic photographers with a eye for color.
@larkvain has a thing for red and his images explore lots of direct contexts for the color. The appetite stimulant, the passion, the anger, the excitement, even its uses in Chinese symbolism. The fact that his images are only taken with his iPhone seems to make this feat of color investigation all the more impressive.
@yellowillow has a predilection for just that: yellow. But not just plain everyday banana yellow, but yellow found in delicate, wistful, or precarious places. Yellow that may only last another hour until the light fades and the angle of the sun will never be quite right again. There is the yellow of street lines of course, but @yellowillow captures it wet and just waking from its freezing soundings. Or the yellow of a fading fern who has spend to many hours in the sun with too little water. If you look carefully this feed will make you rethink the color and its context.
@vintagedaughter takes what many consider to be the annoying over-share of incessent food photography and makes it into something special. Along with touching captions about these meals for one @vintagedaughter packs a lot of color into these little snapshots. The light blue hue of the table casts a luminous sky blue glow over the dishes and the rich browns, greens and reds of her food settle the eye. The images are soothing and welcoming, using color to remind us to treat ourselves to food, even when we are eating alone.
@nikosono is a French-Australian photographer whose taste for color and playful experimentation with texture really make this feed stand out. For many of the pictures @nikosono take to the sky to capture stunning, and often surprising earth tones of Australia.
@whitestwalker's images span the rainbow but many of the photographers best images walk the thin barrier between blue and green. Finding these colors out in the world is one thing, but the framing and the juxtaposition of these pictures give weight to that green-blue "space."
Tell us who your favorite Instagrammers are below and show us your most colorful post!
We don't often cover television shows here at Colour Studio. With a name like Black Sails is hard for a color blog to resist! Executive produced by Michael Bay, Black Sails is a new show from Starz that on first look might just seem like yet another pirate drama, but the show was based on Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel Treasure Island and stands to put a bit of dirt and underworld grime back into the recently romanticized pirate ethos. But why are we so interested? Black Sails has a color lesson to teach about the power of neutrals.
You can learn a lot just by watching the trailer. The show, which is a gritty portrayal of the pirate life, doesn't resort to the dreary grays and desaturated tones of games likes Fallout 3. Black Sails manages to feel gritty and violent and exhausted without being bleak. The colors of the show are rich and tonal and most importantly neutral, or at least neutral with a warm bent. The show's color palette is heavy in black of course, but not a pure inky black, a dusty incomplete color that lingers at the edges of fabric and frame alike. The colors suggest not just an unkempt underworld but a place where characters breathe lungfuls of hot, moist, particulate laden air.
The show is a great example of how the emotional magnitude of colors is played not by the individual colors themselves but how and in what groupings they appear. The dusty, bleed together quality of the colors create a visual environment that lets a splash of red blood or wide swath of blue water really catch the eye, giving more meaning and highlighting certain scenes. This technique can be used in all kinds of color applications: web site design, products and logos, fashion and of course our specialty, architecture. We would love to hear what shows have inspired you in your hunt for new colors!
Everyone knows Milton Glaser, everyone. Even if you don't know his name you likely know a design he created in 1977 for the New York Tourism board. I love New York, a simple grid of three letters and a heart, has outperformed even Milton's wildest dreams for the logo. It has gone on to not only spread all over the world but it has spawned an entire industry of imitation logos. And if imitation really is the finest form of flattery, the I love New York is a world favorite because the Tourism board had filed more than 3,000 suits against imitators.
The popularity of this one image had been so all encompassing that many people miss the lovely, broad, and colorful portfolio of the man who created it. Glaser, born in 1929, a New York native, has made a lifetime of simple and striking design work but one of the best example of his work with color is the album covers he made for Columbia Records artists, including Bob Dylan.
His prowess for creating images for music also included magazine covers, like this one for Eye magazine featuring Aretha Franklin.
Glaser's work and that of Push Pin studios (the graphic design house he founded with fellow Cooper Union graduates Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins, and Edward Sorel, in 1954) cut a huge swath through the design field. Their work has become a central reference in graphic design. Later in 1974 Milton ventured off on his own and founded his own design firm.
Milton Glaser had a habit of questioning the core beliefs of graphic design. Take the assumption that 'If you have to explain it, it's not working.' This is an oft repeated assumption in graphic design because the poster or logo or design will have to stand on its own. But Milton tried other strategies. What if he made images that weren't clear on first glance, images that illicit more curiosity involvement from the readers. He used changes in perspective, cutting posters at odd angles and using isometric grids all to catch the eye and engage the mind for the viewer. Here is a great TED Talk by him of you want to know about his design process and work.
To celebrate the end of the 2013 we wanted to give tribute to an icon with a penchant for color. David Hockney, born 1937, is an English painter who has created extraordinary landscapes, portraits as well as opera sets. His work is stamped with expressive color and attitude. Hockney's recent paintings are currently on exhibit in San Francisco at the De Young Museum in San Franciso, In David Hockney, A Bigger Exhibition, feature groves of trees threaded through with open paths. But the unnatural hue of the bark and undergrowth places these forests in dreamland, through the looking glass, on alien and yet familiar lands. His paintings often depict receding landscapes, with empty paths diverging in woods of riotous color.
Since this is our last post of 2013 and we wanted to spend it reminding ourselves of why just why we love color. Fortunately, Hockney's work not only uses great color but it also thinks about our relationship to color as well. Take these three paintings. You can almost see yourself there, at that exact point in that exact forest. That one thick green tree in the foreground, its lowest branch growing bent, anchors you in that place even as the colors and vibrancy shift from image to image.
These three paintings, each with its own inviting path, are a stunning example of Hockney's colorist prowess. Each place is changed not by rearranging the physical space but solely with shifting color. More than just changes in season the forest in each painting grows in a different climate, maybe even on a different planet. In Hockney's paintings color becomes the content, the main idea, of the painting. These painting say something about the lens through which we see the places we inhabit. That place, the atmosphere, the way it makes you feel, the way it effects your mood and heartbeat and stress level, all of that is influenced by color.
So what do you think? Can we see and make our spaces, and by extension the events that happen there, not grey and concrete rough but brushed as Hockney's forests with world changing color?
Here at Colour Studio we are huge fans of paint. It's everyones familiar source of color. It brightens furniture and interior walls in the intimate spaces of our homes, to the huge buildings, ubiquitous crosswalks, and stunning murals that make up our public landscapes. Paint is everywhere and comes in every color. So this week we wanted to celebrate paint by giving it something it rarely gets in our flat walled worlds: motion! So here are five fantastic videos of paint on the move.
SPIN!
Fabian Oefner, who has also explored the iridescent sheen of bubbles and showers of pigmented powder in his photography work, inspired these spinning phantasms of multicolored paint. Using a rotating disk coated in vicious paint the team at Earth Unplugged whips up some galaxy like beauties with their slow motion camera.
POUR!
Though these amazing paintings by Holton Rower hang on the wall, they are far from flat. After building a series of platforms, some square, some multi-sided, Rower and his team prepare sometimes as many as a hundred batches of different colors. The small batches are then poured over the platform armature and the paint slowly pools over the surface, creating a 3D paintings with a beautiful lattice of paint.
Explode!
A pair of British slow motion camera enthusiasts, The Slow Mo Guys, have done quite a few explosions for the camera over the years but this is one takes paint to the extreme. What happens when you add fire crackers to bottles of colorful paint? Rainbow explosions full of sparks and shattered glass of course.
Float!
If you've never seen this technique let us clue you in. For everything from custom guitars to fancy fingernails, creative painters have taken to floating alcohol based paint on pools of water to get that perfect coat. This technique lets you swirl, mix and texture your way to amazing color combinations that would never have been possible with just any old paintbrush.
Bounce!
With their trusty slow motion camera The Slow Mo Guys are at it again but this time pouring paint where it was never meant to go: on speakers. With the volume cranked up and the paint applied these guys flip on the tunes and watch the paint fly, or more accurately bounce in time with the beat.
If you've seen any great videos of paint on the move share them below and lets celebrate PAINT!
Earlier this year in Normandy, France, the Jean Moulin Elementary School reopened after a terrible fire burnt much of its structure to the ground. And this was no accident, the fire was the result of an arson attack. A fire, and especially a fire at a school is a tragic and scary event for any community but this school and the minds at Prinvault Architectes decided to face those fears straight on. Using colors taken from photographs of the fire the buildings new scheme acknowledges the past while looking toward the future, all with color!
All images property of Prinvault Architectes
To achieve the color palette the architects analyzed a digital photo to find that "a spectrum of 2.5% black, 2.5% zinc yellow, 2.5% yellow gold, 2.5% red-brown, 25% orange-red, burgundy 25%, and 40% carmine red " comprised the hues of the fire. Once the colors were chosen and organized by quantity the team used a list randomizer to choose the order of the colors along the facade.
All images property of Prinvault Architectes
The interior also transforms the colors of the burning fire into a warm happy energetic color scheme. Paired with a main hallway lined with kid sized alcoves for playing games, reading and studying the whole school feels rich and welcoming.
So while your next color project may not be on this scale we can take techniques used in this project and apply them to our own for new and creative color inspiration. In a previous post we introduced you to Kuler, Adobe's fantastic color palette creator. Its lets you create color combinations using a straight color wheel or upload an image and play with combining colors directly from it. For our adventurous readers we recommend taking the list of colors you generate from your images and after deciding on the quantity of each (how many times each should appear in your project and thus on the list) pop them in to this list randomizer and see what computer assisted color magic you can come up with. If you use this technique for your next color scheme we'd love to hear about it!
