“If no one says ‘red’ and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds”
- Original ariticle
T he color you see is only the color you think you see. Your interpretation of light landing on a surface depends on your frame of reference and your frame of mind—both can be altered at the speed of light. When I’m overwhelmed in a crowd I distract myself by looking for as many red-colored objects as I can. Red is not typically a calming color, especially if you’re staring at miles of brake lights in traffic, but it’s really easy for me to see. Red becomes the most dominant thing on my mind.
“Someone who speaks of the character of a colour is always thinking of just one particular way it is used.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Humans have used red since the neolithic era, as seen in the prehistoric cave drawings; When developing languages, red is typically the color named first after black and white. It’s now used so frequently in advertising—because it attracts the most attention—that people have learned to ignore it. The ad industry has successfully made a highly visible color…invisible.
In grade school, I learned that yellow was the most soothing to color with when I brought the expensive markers I wasn’t allowed to use at home to school. I colored in a picture of Paddington wearing a raincoat well enough for my teacher to hang it on the wall for parent-teacher day. The comfort I experienced from quietly meeting the black lines with a high-contrast yellow, disappeared as I waited for my mother to find me out.
White surfaces reflect and scatter visible light, and according to Wittgenstein “very few people have seen pure white.” In the essay In Praise of Shadows” on traditional Japanese aesthetics, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote that “western paper turns away light, while [Japanese] paper seems to take it in, to envelope it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.” If you take a piece of computer paper, that you know is white in its normal surroundings, and place it next to snow, the paper may appear grey. A white can be light grey in poor lighting or a light grey in good lighting.
In color therapy, also known as chromotherapy, shifts in color can change minds. Each color is believed to have healing energies that can affect the body, like red for passion, green for harmony, and violet for intuition. One method for administering chromotherapy includes eating foods of a specific color. The artist Sophie Calle does this in her series The Chromatic Diet. Inspired by Paul Auster’s Leviathan, in which a character inspired by Sophie Calle herself restricts her diet to foods of a single color on certain days, Calle recreates and photographs each meal in the book as an act to bring herself and the fictional character closer together.
Colors can be hard to see. To the chemist John Dalton, red, orange, yellow, and green all appeared the same. The rest of the color spectrum appeared as gradients of blue and purple. Dalton went on to write the first scientific paper on the subject of color blindness, Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours” in 1798.
People with decreased ability to differentiate between hues experience color through a series of judgments. My colleague, for example, explained that for red, green, and brown to function for him, he has to consider their context. These judgments may be “wrong” when they need to be “right”; Like the order of a traffic light, the alternating red and green battery light on a vape pen, or the order of a color legend matching the clockwise color placement in a pie chart.
“If one says ‘red’ and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds,” wrote the artist and educator Josef Albers.
We see fifty different reds because we each perceive and experience color differently. The artist Wassily Kandinsky could practically hear and taste color because of his synesthesia. To him yellow was a trumpet’s C note, black was the end of things, “blue is cold, red is a square, and green is a feeling,” as summarized by the painter Amy Sillman who called Kandinsky’s philosophy a kind of color astrology in her essay “Drug, Poison, Remedy, Talisman, Cosmetic, Intoxicant.”
Colors can change depending on the nature of surfaces, like the atmospheric oxidation of the Statue of Liberty’s plating from shiny copper to verdigris (a bluish-green patina). In 1906, the Army Corps of Engineers vetoed a proposal from the United States Congress to restore the statue, concluding that the patina protecting the underlying metal from corrosion “softened the outlines, and made it beautiful.”
White surfaces reflect and scatter visible light, and according to Wittgenstein “very few people have seen pure white.” In the essay “In Praise of Shadows” on traditional Japanese aesthetics, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote that “western paper turns away light, while [Japanese] paper seems to take it in, to envelope it gently, like the soft surface of a first snowfall.” If you take a piece of computer paper, that you know is white in its normal surroundings, and place it next to snow, the paper may appear grey. A white can be light grey in poor lighting or a light grey in good lighting.
A flat gray surface can come to life through its small modulations of shading, which requires a visual sensitivity to tonal differences. The act of arranging the subtle differences is like arranging lengths of sticks or consecutive numbers, according to Wittgenstein, who once asked, “To what extent can we compare black and white to yellow, red, and blue?”
“Someone who speaks of the character of a colour is always thinking of just one particular way it is used.”
- Reading Response
T he article “Everyday Color Theory - A poetic crash course on the history of color” touches on the personal nature of perception, highlighting perceptions of colors are highly subjective. That is, colors bring in different perceptions among individuals of diverse cultural and emotional backgrounds. I was particularly interested in the author’s viewpoint on colors helps evoking emotional responses which resonates my personal experience of intentionally choosing certain colors in branding/graphic design to create a desirable vibe for users. For example, if I were to create a color palette for an internal communication app for employees that elevates efficiency and collaboration, I would use blue as the main color to convey professionalism and intelligence. If I were to design an education app facing students/parents, I would use orange as the main color to convey warmth and friendliness, making the user experience welcoming and approachable.
Color Perception is definitely a crucial part in evoking emotions but should be used cautiously according to target audience’s cultural background. Take the perception of white for example, differ significantly due to its historical and symbolic associations. White is perceived as pure, innocent in western countries. In western weddings, brides often wear white to symbolizes their purity. In Eastern countries, however, white is often associated with death since people usually wear white clothes in funerals to mourn their passings. I remember vividly when Ikea first entered China, I was shocked by the white paper lights hanging all over the cafeteria, creating a funerary atmosphere since Chinese people only use white paper lights in case of funerals. When selecting colors for decorations in a foreign countries, it is important to look at their symbolic meaning which might work counter-productively otherwise.