Key Questions in Colour Design

  • Does ‘colour’ exist?
  • Why is colour so difficult to define?
  • Why is mixing and combining colours so unpredictable?

Physiologically colour is a sensation of light that is transmitted to the brain through the eye. Tiny differences in wavelengths are processed by the brain into a myriad nuances of colour that convey meaning.

  • Colour, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation (Matisse)
  • Colour must be thought, imagined, dreamed (Gustave Moreau 1893)
  • Colour is like a closing eyelid, a tiny fainting spell (Roland Barthes)
  • Colour precedes words and antedates civilisation (Leonard Shalin)
  • Colour cannot stand alone (Wassily Kandinsky)
  • Colour deceives continuously (Josef Albers)
  • Colour is an illusion, but not an unfounded illusion (C L Hardin)
  • Colour is accidental and has nothing in common with the innermost essence of the thing (Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner)

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

Albers  Interaction of Color 1963 p1

Our perception of colour depends on both physical factors relating to the way the eye registers light and more psychological and cultural factors that affect the way the brain reacts to and interprets colours and their relationships to each other. Because each of us is unique – our eye/brain reactions and cultural experiences differ – we can only talk in terms of generalisations.

Colour can only exist when three components are present:

  • a viewer
  • an object
  • light.

It can be said to work on 3 interlinked levels:

Physics of light

The physical process as light bounces off objects and is transmitted to the eye.

Eye/brain physiology

Emotional level as the brain reacts instinctively to interprete the significance of the light signals it receives, evoking sensations that are ‘hard-wired’ by evolution, but also often subjective depending on individual physiology and involving non-visual effects

Symbolic meanings

The cultural level, where the brain associates certain colours and combinations with culturally specific experiences and meanings that have been learned.

Artists and designers have used and experimented with complexities and ambiguities in interactions between physical and psychological dimensions of colour to portray emotions and question the nature of perception.

Artists may choose to focus on local or optical colour. Or use completely arbitrary colours to impose their feelings and interpretation onto the image.

In printmaking, particularly relief prints, there is clear colour separation on the printing plate. This can use either layering and mixing, or optical mixing through juxtaposition.

In Graphic Design a fourth element is inevitably involved: how to ensure colour consistency when translating designs into and between analog, digital and/or on-line presentations.