Color Theory

Hi. My name is Arielle Eckstut, and I am  the author of What Is Color? 50 Questions and Answers on the Science of Color. Color is an incredibly difficult subject, one that encompasses all kinds of categories of science and history and culture – you name it.

But today in about five minutes I'm going to try to answer this question: What is color? And I'm going to do that by starting with yet another question. In the fall, do the leaves change color if no one is there to see them? Take a moment to think about that: Do the leaves change color if no one is there to see them? Now, the *obvious answer* to this question is "Of course they change color

because the color of the leaves are  inherent to the leaves themselves." But in fact, that is not true at all, and the answer is a resounding *no*. If there is not a living being with a brain  observing those leaves, the leaves do not change color. And the reason for this is that there's no such thing as color without the *eyes* and the *brain*.

So, different brains process visual information differently. And I realized that this idea that color does not exist outside of our perception can be very difficult to swallow. And in fact, our brains go to great lengths to give us all of the colors that we see.

The source of our color vision is in our *retina*, a credit-card-thin sheet of neurons in the back of our eyeballs. And it's actually a part of our brain, our retina. It's the only part of our brain that exists outside of our skulls. And our retina is what we typically associate with sight in general. If I were to ask you, "Why do we have eyes?" most people would say, "So we can see."

But that was actually not the original purpose of  our eyes and our retina. The original purpose was to tell us when to be awake and when to be asleep. So, our eyes sensed when it was light out and when it was dark out, and "when" is the most important word here because our eyes, our retinas have three different systems:

the *when system* being the most primitive and the first use of our eyes. The next system is the *where system*, and that  tells us where we are situated in the world. Are we right at the edge of a cliff? Are we too close to a potential predator? Or are we too far to reach a berry that is  ripe that we would like to eat?

Lastly, we get to our *what system* – the system that designers deal with on a daily basis but the one that is actually *least important* to our visual system. The what system is the system that we use when we are *focusing on something*, whether that be a computer screen or a phone or a face or a road sign. It's also the system that we use to see color.

Color scientist Mark Rea has a great quote that I adore: "Color is a pigment of our imagination." And that really is true. Our imagination plays such a big role when it comes to color. And our brains are constantly taking in information from the outside world to help inform us about what time of day it is, where we are in the world, what we're looking at,

which really gets us to the next question,  which is: Why do we see color to begin with?

Why do we see color? Designers intuitively  know the answer to this question: It's to help us distinguish one thing from  another and even to understand the thing itself. And what I mean by that is if you're looking at  someone's face and they look very pale,

maybe with a yellow cast or a blue cast, we might understand that that person is sick or something is wrong; or, we're looking at a series of tomatoes, each one more ripe than the next – we are clued in to when the tomato is ready to eat. Maybe we're looking at a subway map and we see that each line is a different color, helping us to understand

which line we want to go on and where we want to go to. Along with shape, texture, movement, darkness and lightness, the more color that we could see, the more we could interpret about the world around us. By using color, designers are giving people a shorthand for how to use the products that they are designing. For example, if you are designing a pill bottle with pills inside,

the color of the bottle and the color of the pills themselves can distinguish not only from other pills that someone might be taking but even different dosages between them. Things like a traffic light, which, sure we could memorize what the order of the traffic light is, but having *color on top of order* gives us an incredibly quick and easy mechanism

for our brain to understand what to do next. Even things like sports uniforms – the reason that we have different colors for different  uniforms is that it gives fans that immediate clue as to what to do when someone runs down one side  of a field or another: do we cheer or do we boo? Just as important to the question of "Why do we see color?" is:

Why do we not see all the colors that are in our vision at once? And I'm not talking about ultraviolet or infrared or colors outside of the ability of our color vision. I'm talking about when we look at, for example, a red house and one side is in shadow and one side is in light; we're not seeing that house as partly dark red and partly pink.

We are just seeing it as a red house, and there's a very good reason for that. Just as I don't feel every sensation that is  happening to my body every minute, like my glasses on the bridge of my nose – I'm not thinking about that until I actually think about it. My feet on the floor, that sensation – I'm not aware of it until I bring my mind to it, and throughout my body, there are all kinds of sensations going on all at once;

but it would be too much for the brain to be thinking about those things *all the time* on top of all the other sensations that we have, one of which is the light that is entering our eyes. So, if we were to register the millions of colors that are coming into our eyes all at once, our brain would just shut down; it would be too much; we wouldn't be able to make our way through the world, to make decisions, to move – all of these things. So, this becomes very important for designing because we have to decide

what we want the *focus* of people's attention to be. If we go back to this idea that color gives us information to help interpret the world, then we have to think about: "How are we using color so that it is giving us the right information to give us the right interpretation?" So, too much color, too much sensation, and then what follows we call *perception* – what we're actually

perceiving – can be confusing. Too little color might not give us enough information. We also take our clues about color from the *culture* where we live. So, for example, in the Western world, yellow is not a color that is particularly beloved, but in the Eastern world, it is.

So, the messaging that comes with the colors that you choose depend on *who* is receiving that color. We also have very personal associations with color  which make it hard for designers because we don't   know – unless we're designing for one person – what  each person's reaction to a color is going to be. And lastly, we have these *biological reactions* to  color, which at this point we know very, very little about.

So, when you go on the internet and you read, for example, that peach makes you hungry, the color peach, well, we don't know that at all – that's just a bunch of internet fake news. But we do know certain things about blue light, for example, or about the color red, and there are associations – biological – rooted in our biology in these colors that  have an effect on us.

But taken together with the cultural and the personal, there's lots and lots of clues that are being given to a person, and these have to be accounted for in the design  process – maybe not the personal part, but certainly the biological – the little that we know – and the cultural piece of it. So, to sum this up, why do we see color? We see color to help give us information so that we can make our way through the world

without harming ourselves and hopefully with helping ourselves. And color is this extraordinary tool, and it's one with a very fine point. It's one that was developed late in the development of the human brain. It is not essential to our being alive; take color-blind people, for example, but it's one that gives us the opportunity to be  able to navigate quickly, easily and often with joy.

If you're starting as a designer, you don't  need a lot of colors, just as with fonts. If you're thinking, 'Okay, I have 60 million colors in that little picker, so let's try to use all of them!' that's not really the case. What you really need is a *background color*, a *foreground color* and an *accent color*. And there are some rules that you  can then look up on your own later, like the *60-30-10 rule*, which is pretty useful. But, in general, what you need to really remember from this is that you need a *background color*,  so in my case it's going to be white.

Then you need a *text color*, which is going to be some sort of black or dark gray, and the *accent color for the important actions*. And one thing that you can actually tweak here is to have that darker color instead of being pure black, add a little bit of that accent color. So, in our case, the blue to it, so it's just going to look a little bit more connected to the blue and it's just going to look better together. So, that's just one way. And you need *three colors* really to pull off most designs.

And you can start adding colors once you  feel more comfortable with them. But when you're starting, really just the less colors the better because it's just much harder that way to screw it up. Two of the worst possible color combinations  are mixing red with either very saturated blue or very saturated green. And if you look at it more closely depending on the type of screen that you have, you'll see that on the place where they kind of mix together,

that little line becomes a little bit fuzzy. If you look at it a little bit longer, it starts to hurt your eyes in some cases on some screens because this contrast of those colors works really, really bad together. So, if you want to make a Christmas app, for example, there are better ways to do it, but *generally avoid those color combinations* and *always test your colors if they're clashing that way*. So, you can just place one on top of the other and see if that fuzzy line appears on them.

And that's one way to actually test it – you know – *by eye*, just looking at it. If it looks good, then it looks good.