Understanding Color:

An Introduction for Designers

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Color Study

Color is stimulating...

calming...

expressive...

disturbing...

impressional...

cultural...

exuberant...

symbolic.

Forms, colors and their arrangement are the foundation elements of design, and color is the most

powerful.

A skilled colorist understands what color is, how it is seen, why it changes, its suggestive power, and how to apply that knowledge to

enhance the marketability of a product.

Whether the product is a graphic design...

an item of apparel...

an interior...

automobile...

toaster...

garden...

or anything else, good coloring can determine its success or failure in the consumer marketplace.

Color is, first, a sensory event.Colors are true sensations, not abstractions

or ideas.

The beginnning of every color experience is a physiological response to a stimulus of

light.

Colors are experienced in two different ways:

Colors on a monitor or screen are seen as direct light.

The colors of the physical world - of printed pages, objects, and the environment - are

seen asreflected light.

The perception of colored

light is a straightforw

ard experience:

light reaches the eye

directly from a light

source.

The experience of real-world color is a more complex event.

Real-world colors are seen indirectly, as light reflected from a surface

For tangible objects and printed pages, light is the cause of color, colorants (like paints or dyes) are the means used to generate color, and the

colors that are seen are the effect.

Cause

Means

Effect Colors Seen

Colorants

Light

All colors, whether they are seen as direct or reflected light, are unstable. Every change

in light or medium has the potential to change the way a color is perceived.

In addition, not everyone sees or interprets colors in quite the same way.

These differences in perception are hard to define except in the cases of extreme visual

disfunction (as in color blindness).

Normal Red/Green Color Blindness

Colors are understood at different levels of awareness.

Environmental color, whether natural or man-made, is all-encompassing.

Yet we are often unaware of the color around us - even though the color can affect our

mood or disposition.

The separateness of an object allows the viewer to focus on a single entity and single

color idea.

Graphic colors are the colors of images: painted, drawn, printed, or on-screen.

Colors on a monitor screen are seen as direct light.

But objects are seen as reflected light.

Since nearly all design today is done on a monitor screen which uses direct light, careful consideration must be made of how the designed product will look

in reflected light.

Color has many uses:

It can increase or decrease available light.

It can modify the perception of space, creating illusions of size, nearness, separation, or distance. It

can also increase or decrease available light.

It can be used to create continuity between separated elements in design...

...to establish emphasis or create focus in a composition.

Color can express mood or emotion.

Colors can be used to alert, to warn, or to provide discrimination between objects of

similar form and size.

It can be nonverbal language; communicating ideas without words.

A color-order model, or color system, is a structured model of color relationships.

Technical-scientific systems measure color under limited conditions, and most deal with the colors of light.

Commercial color-order systems are systematic arrangements of colors meant to assist the user in selecting colors from a limited palette.

Intellectual-philosophical systems explore the meaning and organization of color.

True color systems attempt to illustrate all colors and include the option of adding colors

beyond those illustrated.

Color collections offer a fixed and limited number of colors to help the user in making a selection within a single product or group of

related products.

Color study focuses FIRST on learning to discriminate objective

attributes of color:

Hue

Value

Saturation

The SECOND focus of color study is color control.

Color control is the ability to use color skillfully to facilitate the idea or meaning the

designer is trying to create.

Color study also provides guidelines for creating effective color combinations.

Many color courses are based on the writings of Albert Munsell (1858-1918)

Munsell’s system is based on formal progressions of hue,

value, and saturation.

The color experiments of Josef Albers (1888-1976) also inform

students of color.

Albers stressed the power of eye-training exercises.

In this course, we will learn about both artists’ systems and how to

use them in design.