Often we are unaware of the power of colour, it’s so common we have become desensitised on a conscious level to it. While I was watching ‘Natural Born Killers’ tonight, it brought home to me how colour is really powerful in creating, enhancing and influencing emotions. Many films use colour as a cinematic effect, this film though does it in what I personally think is about the peak of colour and emotion art.
I’ve always loved black and white when it’s used with one colour to create impact. I think it’s the photographer in me, might just be the designer. Colour is all around us and it often takes it being placed out of context to bang home with real power. I recall somewhere there being a study in food that was coloured various ‘unnatural’ colours. This of course, produced the result that even the most tasty food was seen as disgusting.
Think about red for instance, what does this mean to you? Fear, hatred, love, passion, anger? What about blue? Calm, sad, peace? Think about green, yellow and white – what do these colours mean to you? What emotions do you feel when you visualise these colours?
Our brains are wired from early years to see meaning in certain colours, to feel those colours deep in our consciousness. It becomes something that is just part of us. Of course, it can vary from culture to culture. This use of colour to create meaning comes from primal instincts where colours are signposts. Seasons produce their own palettes from spring to winter.
Colour is literally all around us, our perceptions of it may vary but you can’t escape it – you just have to open your eyes (sometimes you even see colour when they are shut).
Recently I wanted to play with the color pallets of some well-known products.
The first one I did was Windows Vista, the yellow and blue. Except here I used butterflies in the design. It gave it a totally different feel. I also tried the Starbuck’s web site (a light java brown and the green from their logo). Hmmm, I happened to use trees in that design because that is what the combination of green and brown gave me visually. It came out slightly depressing (probably because I used a tree with bare branches).
But I really enjoyed the exercise and learned a lot about the deisgn by playing with the color choices. For instance I can now see why Starbuck’s livened up their site with the multiple colors in their icons. And I noticed tonight while writing this that their site has been recently revised… no more brown and green ïŠ
And speaking of color, I love the new chocolate raspberry theme. It also screams coffee :)
Another film that uses colour really well is PT Anderson’s ‘Punch Drunk Love’. There’s a great analysis of the film here: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/pt_anderson.html
I can highly recommend the beautiful illustrated and concise book: Colour management – A comprehensive Guide for Graphic Designers published by Rotovision. It demystifies the theory, and opens the door to the a new use of color to communicate and entertain.
Colour definitely has an impact.
One thing that I find hard as a designer is creating global sites (meant to appeal to anyone) as colours take on different meanings depending on the users country, faith or other factor.
So colour is important in design but one cannot solely rely on it in my view. Use it to enhance, not to define.
@christy that is a great idea taking existing colour palettes and playing to see why they did it. A great learn by peeling of the layers exercise and you seem to have had some interesting results.
@mathew I will also check that film out – good use of colour deserves a look in itself in my book.
@johan will check that book out as sounds good.
@andrew the differeneces in cultures and colours is something I’ve been looking into recently and I also aim to write a post on this at some point in future. It’s a really interesting subject… well for my anyways ;)
As for colour being a defining – I think I agree but I don’t see anything as the be all and end of a design – not the form. not content, not the colour. However, the odd flipside of this is that a bad anyone of those and many more things can break it very quickly.