Bookstore presentation from The Secret Language of Color authors

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF

DESIGNED BYEIGHT AND A HALF

BROOKLYN, NY

SCIENCE, NATURE, HISTORY, CULTURE, BEAUTY OF RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE & VIOLET

JOANN ECKSTUT AND ARIELLE ECKSTUT

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WANT TO BUY CHEAP SEATS AT A SPORTING MATCH? GET ON THE RIGHT LINE OF THE LONDON UNDERGROUND? LEARN TO TYPE FAST? COLOR IS YOUR GUIDE. THESE COLOR MAPS SHOWS HOW PREVALENT THE USE OF COLOR IS TO EXPLAIN, ELUCIDATE, AND NAVIGATE AT A GLANCE.

EULER/VENN DIAGRAM

STADIUM TICKETS TRANSPORTATION MAP

TOUCH TYPING

1,197

1,143

1,107

1,008

945

891

738

675

612

486

396

279

150

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135

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120

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Calvin Klein

Georgio Aramani

AlexanderMcQueen

VivienneWestwood

YohjiYamamoto

Emilio Pucci

NEUTRALS

BLACKS

PASTELS

BRIGHTS

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DO YOU COME HERE OFTEN?Not all pollinators are attracted to the same color fl owers. Instead particular colors attract particular members of the animal kingdom. Smell also comes into the picture, especially for fl ies, which are attracted to fl owers that smell like rotting fl esh.

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or fl ies, owers

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Mycena interrupla

Cookeina tricholoma Cortinarius iodes

Unknown Ascomycete

A RAINBOW OF FUNGI…


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Unknown Lepista sp.

Hygrocybe psittacina

Podostroma cornu-damae Leotia viscosa

Mucronella sp.


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JAMES CLERK MAXWELL AND THE REIGN OF ELECTRO-MAGNETISM Before James Clerk Maxwell’s work, electricity and magnetism were believed to be two separate forces, but Max-well found the forces to be connected, and he called this intercon-nection electromagnetism. Maxwell showed how charged particles repel or attract one another, as well as how these charged particles act like waves as they travel through space.

A particularly exciting part of Maxwell’s treatise on the sub-ject showed that a specifi c group of electromagnetic waves is the cause of visible light—in other words, the cause of color. He identifi ed other groups of electromagnetic waves, too, groups we

now recognize as ultraviolet light, radio waves, x-rays, and mi-crowaves, to name a few. All of these fall on the electromagnetic spectrum, and each is measured and defi ned by its length and frequency, which are inversely proportional. Every color has a di! erent length and frequency, as does every microwave, radio wave, or other wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum; but there is no essential quality separating visible light from these other kinds of waves—except that our eyes (or to be more precise, our brains) can perceive them as color.

To get a handle on exactly what length and frequency are all about, imagine you are holding one end of a jump rope. Another

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ON THE SAME WAVELENGTHAll electromagnetic radiation (just another word for the movement of a wave through an electromagnetic fi eld) travels through a vacuum at the stupendous speed of 186,282 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. As you can see, the visible spectrum is just a tiny band of the elecromagnetic spectrum.

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SIMULTANEOUS CONTRAST

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—Josef Albers

Because color is interpreted by our brains, a single color has the ability to shift and change depending on the color adjacent to it. A particular red placed beside a blue will appear quite di! er-ent when it is set next to an orange. This phenomenon is known as simultaneous contrast.

To understand how simultaneous contrast works, take a look at the black and white image below, designed by physicist/chem-ist, Robert Shapely and psychologist, James Gordon.

Pay particular attention to the upper and lower parts of the sphere. You’ll see that the top appears to be a lighter gray than the bottom, but it’s really just the gray in the square behind the circle that is changing color. It’s darker at the top and lighter at the bottom. Simultaneous contrast is most evident at the points where the top and bottom edges of the sphere meet the background color.

Now look at the intersecting lines below in this exercise de-signed by Michael White. The gray lines on the right appear signifi cantly lighter than the gray lines on the left. And yet a ma-chine that measures color, will tell you they’re exactly the same.

Next comes color and simultaneous contrast. Check out the squares below:

The red square on the left appears to be darker than the red square on the right. But they are exactly the same color. The same holds true for the green squares below:

The green square on the left looks brighter than the one on the right, but the hue, just as in the last example, is the same. In each case, when the squares are placed on top of the lighter color, they look darker; placed on the darker color, they look brighter.

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The hole in the board was small enough that it only allowed one of the refracted colors to pass through it. He then placed all kinds of materials (including a second prism) in front of the beam passing through the small hole to try to alter the refracted color passing through the small hole. Prior to the experiment, he had believed that if, for example, a blue piece of glass was placed in front of a red beam of light, the red would be transformed into another color. But he found that this was not the case. No matter what color or type of material he placed in front of an individual beam of light, he couldn’t get the refracted color to change. From this experiment, he deduced that there was a certain number of what he called “spectral” colors—colors that cannot be broken down, colors that are fundamental.

Once Newton confi rmed that his spectral colors were un-changeable, he decided to name them—and here’s where his method takes a left turn from the scientifi c to the fanciful. Taken with the idea that the rainbow should refl ect the musical scale, Newton decided to name his colors in accordance with aesthet-ics. There are seven main tones in the musical scale, so Newton came up with seven corresponding colors. Hence the origin of ROYGBIV, the acronym by which we know Newton’s seven spec-tral colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Although the relationship to music was later set aside by scien-tists who questioned the basis for comparison, ROYGBIV is still used today as a teaching tool, even though indigo is not a color most people can even identify.

The truth is, there’s no perfect way to name the colors of the rainbow. Take a look at a real rainbow (as opposed to a kinder-gartner’s felt-tip rendition), and you’ll see that its colors merge seamlessly from one to the other. Any judgment on where one col-or ends and the other begins is arbitrary. Even Newton wa! ed on this point. At the beginning of his experimentation, his spectrum included eleven colors. Once he’d whittled the number down to seven, he still thought of orange and indigo as less important, calling them semitones in another nod to the musical scale.

There’s another issue with naming the colors of the rainbow: The language of color is fl uid, morphing over time and across geographies in response to cultural forces that are sometimes too complex to pin down. For example, the color Newton called indigo is the one most people would identify as plain old blue or a true blue that falls midway between green and violet. Newton’s blue is what we now call cyan, a more turquoise blue that falls between blue and green.

Here’s Newton’s own color wheel

containing red, orange, yellow, green,

blue, indigo, and violet.

Newton’s experiment.

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More than any other color of the spectrum, yellow stands out. This is because the sensitivity of our eyes is at its peak when it encounters wavelengths of light we perceive as yellow. So if you were looking at a pale yellow, it would appear brighter than a pale blue, to which our eyes are not nearly as sensitive. We can also distinguish many more shades of yellow than blue because of our sensitivity to the color.

Although we were most likely always able to see yellow, scientists postulate that we probably developed an extra sensitivity to yellow to distinguish yellow and orange-yellow fruits from the green leaves surrounding them. These

fruits were too big for birds and needed pollinators. We just happened (or did we?) to develop our increased sensitivity to yellows at the same time.

THE EMPEROR’S CLOTHES One of the world’s oldest civiliza-tions, China has a history that has long been saturated with the color yellow, starting with the man credited with being its fi rst ancestor, a mythic character named The Yellow Emperor of Huangdi. The Yellow Emperor’s reign is said to have begun in the twenty-sixth century BC, and his inventions and leadership helped Chinese civilization take root.

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