Month: February 2023

Color may just be one of the single most subjective things out there. If you’re in a room full of people and ask them for their favorite color, you’d be hard pressed to find more than one or two people whose favorites are the same color for the same reason. Despite this, there seems to be something hard-coded into our cultural DNA to have different emotional responses to different colors. For example, a danger warning will probably feel a lot more urgent if it was bright red as opposed to, say, sky blue. Chapter 4 of Paul Zelanski and Mary Pat Fisher’s book Color outlines some of the various effects color has on people. All this is to say, color will mean different things to different people, but there are a few baseline rules that are handy to follow, such as red being a much more in-your-face, loud, and urgent color than a meek dark blue.

Some designs use color in really intelligent and creative ways. Ever wonder why so many fast-food chains have red and yellow logos? It’s because those are the colors that will catch your attention first when driving, when you don’t have a lot of time to carefully look at the signs passing by. A store such as Whole Foods, on the other hand, uses green in its logo as a subtle way to drive home the whole “you’re making a healthy choice by shopping here,” as green invokes imagery of not just green veggies, but nature as a whole. Of course, you can overanalyze as many logos as you want to try to squeeze meaning out of any color, but that’s kind of the whole point: color should be thought out and intentional.

This gets us to Corporate Memphis. You’ve seen it before; think of the flat, geometric people that seemingly every company is using nowadays. Beyond my personal hatred for nearly every aspect of this art style, it objectively uses color terribly. Worse than that, it’s not just that the colors don’t have poorly thought-out meaning, they don’t have any meaning at all. Corporate Memphis’ entire justification for existing is being an inclusive, culturally neutral art style that companies can slap onto their branding and advertising to lazily imply that they are a morally good entity. Given that, their use of color makes more sense, as cultures have different ingrained connotations tied to colors, but practically, it makes for a boring, soulless design, which is a problem with the art style as a whole, but I am placing the majority of the blame on its color use.

Take this example from Facebook. Okay, based on the overall bright color scheme and body language of the characters drawn, we are clearly supposed to get a sense of fun and joy. So that begs the question, why is the violin, the “vessel of fun” of the dude smack-dab in the middle the same dark (read: NOT FUN) color as the background? Why is 80% of the second-from-the-left lady’s design taken up by purple? What’s that supposed to convey? That she’s . . . rich? Some sort of nobility? A sagely wizard? What’s the point in making the skin tone of two of the people be a direct match to the color of another’s pants? I get this nauseating feeling that the goal was to make the colors represent both everything and nothing at the same time, which is an awful idea. This is an example of bad color use, in which (in my opinion) the color choices actively detract from the design as a whole. If the colors were, god forbid, thought out, maybe this design wouldn’t make me hate Facebook even more than I already do. But, here we are, and I hate Facebook, and I hate this art style.

A good example of well-thought out colors in this art style would be anything from Youtube science channel Kurzgesagt. They use a similar art style while actually managing to convey real meaning with their color choices. Take this for example:

This is the thumbnail for the video entitled “Loneliness,” which you probably could’ve gotten just from the design. See how the meaning of the overall color scheme isn’t forcibly stripped away from it? Overanalysis time: the use of blue (a color commonly associated with sadness) corresponds with red, allowing for the purple (being both red and blue in a way) in the middle to effectively communicate that it is something that is both a part of the rest while being distinctly different, which is a common feeling that lonely people have.

This is getting too long so I’ll cut it short with a short and simple conclusion: color is good when use well, but color is really bad when used poorly.

I never really thought too deep into the meaning of color and why I chose a specific color and why. I simply thought about what I was trying to do and what looked good to me at the time. I have, though, researched what color is associated with 20 years of being married because my husband and I are celebrating our 20 years of marriage this year and we are renewing our vows. The color, silver, represented 20 years, so we chose silver as one of the colors in our theme.

In our reading, I learned that colors have healing properties, mood properties, and other psychological properties that may help others understand us better without even saying a word. I would give it a name as non-verbal understanding. Specifically, the reading mentioned bright red, orange, and yellow as being a stimulator. Blue and green helped people to feel more peaceful. Black was represented as being depressed and afraid. Let’s talk about black for a moment…..those that are referenced as “gothic” who wear all black, are they “depressed and afraid”? I am not sure, but it is something to think about. I know, before I lost weight, I felt like black was the only color that looked best on me because of the illusion of a slimmer body. I guess you could say that I felt a sense of depression and shame of my overweight body at that time. Now, black is not part of my daily wear life.

Let’s talk about the science of healing with colors: chromo-therapy. It is a practice of being bathed with colored lights, placed in colored environments and asked to meditate on specific colors thought to stimulate particular glands. I am sure that a lot of medical spas use this type of therapy along with other internal and external treatments. This is more in tune with natural remedies and healing instead of using pharmaceuticals. I was particularly intrigued by the Indian philosophy 7 chromatic hues of the rainbow; the chakras. Each chakra is represented by a color and have a philosophical meaning behind them. See the image for additional information.

In the article “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Ste Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard” I didn’t particularly like the article began talking about Kodak’s early practices when it came down to their preferred audience for photography. It even mentioned that some felt like Kodak was racist because they only marketed “white” women or having a “white” woman as their brand image.

Jim Lyon stated that “it wasn’t a big deal, but simply the right thing to do” by incorporating black models into their marketing plan. I absolutely disagree that it wasn’t a big deal. It was a huge deal and sent a strong message in the beginning that it wasn’t for “black” people. The article stated that while people were the consumers that were buying Kodak products. The reason for this is because in that time, black people were not allowed to have equal access to the same resources as white people and felt like Kodak was not for them anyway. I am glad that they realized their error and became more inclusive because after all “white” would be boring without accentuating colors (hues) to go along with it.