Author: connorb

Color has always been something that I have taken for face value. In other words, when I look at a color my thoughts are “I like this color”, or “I don’t like this color”, or “this color doesn’t go with this one”. I was just looking a color from a very surface level point of view . I just looked at the color that was in front of me and decided if I liked it or not and that is all. I never really looked for a deeper meaning or reason to why I liked it or not. I also have never realized that colors can be very intentional and that you can convey a lot of different meanings and feelings simply by using colors. Now that I know this I want to point out a few things a I have noticed since I started looking at colors in a deeper way. I have noticed that water bottle companies that have blue wrapping on their bottles come across as more natural or organic.

This was always a thought that I subconsciously had, I didn’t know anything about the water companies but my subconscious told me they were better quality or more organic. Once I realized this it opened my eyes to this I realized that the reason I had these beliefs was because of the color choice in the water bottle label. The labels were blue, I think that this made me feel that way because obviously blue is the color of the ocean and other bodies of water. Also, water is depicted in the color of blue a lot of times. These two factors has made me create an association with the color blue that gives me the feeling of hydration and organic water. I believe that these companies new that most people have this same association with the color blue, and that is why they chose that color. Water bottles that have basic white labels like this one:

This basic white label with a little touch of blue Makes me think of cheap or “off brand” water, in reality I actually like the taste of the “cheap” water more. If I didn’t see the labels I might would pick the white label water as the more organic one. But because the label is white it makes me feel like it is off brand or cheap. So then I started thinking about why I felt that way about white lables or the color white in general. The reason why is because white is a default color, when a piece of paper has nothing on it, its just white. So when I see a basic label that is white it makes me think that there was no effort put into it and that the product is very bland.
I like to look at things from a marketing perspective so this is very interesting to me because I didn’t realize how much the color of a product or brand logo can affect the way that someone perceives it. Im glad that I chose a plain black logo now because I was not thinking intentionally about colors at that point.

This is my favorite color: #68A5C5

The reason that I like it is because, I think that shades and tints of blue are vibrant and they give off a vibrant but manly and organic feel to me. I like the organic feel but I do not like sky blue as much as this shade because sky blue is too basic and also feels overused to me. The blue that I chose is a little closer the grey and neutral tones. I like the mix of natural and neutral.

These two chapters of the book “The non-designers book by Robin Williams have helped me develop my creative eye in a new way. Chapter two in the book speaks on proximity, this was important tool for me to put in my tool belt of creative thoughts to think about while trying to create. The main points that I took away from this chapter is that the proximity of items on a document can give the audience a sense of relationship. I found this tool to be very useful in a flyer type document because giving information a relationship to other things on the document can help navigate the audience through the information in an orderly manner. The other creative tool I learned about which was the most useful to me was alignment.

This chapter taught me that alignment of information can also show relation ship and changing the alignment can give the document a new mood. I also learned that having a very clean and aligned document can make the document more pleasing to the eye and present the information in a more clear way. This was a good thing for me to learn because I feel like it opened up my eye to notice these things in documents now. One example in the book stuck with me, it was when the book gave the example of imagining an invisible line connecting two elements in the document to keep them cohesive. I thought about this and realized that I can apply this theory to photography as well. I am thinking that if align certain elements in my pictures with the thought of an invisible line connecting them then it might provide me with some unique compositions. This made me realize that most things to do with art or design share a lot of the same principles, then knowing this fact made me realize that being creative in general is really just learning what elements make something pleasing to consume or look at and then implementing them to your own ideas to make create something that speaks what you would like it to while also being widely seen as aesthetic. I am excited to use these new concepts that I have learned while working on my logo. I am also excited to try to sue these techniques in my photography as well.