From products we use, clothes we wear, and spaces we inhabit, we rely on color to provide visual appeal, data codes, and meaning. This book addresses first how we experience color and then, through specific examples, how color is used in a spectrum of design-based disciplines: apparel design, graphic design, interior design, and product design. These topics explore color as an individual and cultural phenomenon, as a pragmatic device for communication, and as a valuable marketing tool. The use of engaging examples increases our awareness and understanding of the potential uses of color within the design disciplines.
This book can be a valuable resource for both design practitioners and scholars. Contributions are based upon well-defined research with a number of different means specified to reach results. Color is the focus in the three sections of the book that delve deeply into the nuance of study, use, and experience of color as it informs and communicates. How we experience color and the visual cognition process are explored through specific applications. These applications are meant to provide an enticing sample of their potential in the study of color.
This book provides insight in the quest for understanding color and design and our human response and the consequences. Semantics influence our perception of color and function in designed objects; color meanings and use evolve out of significant events and mass media coverage; colors influence marketing and our selections of products and services; branding with color promotes marketing efforts.
Color is a feature of products we use and plays a large part in what each of us experiences in our everyday surroundings. We name colors based upon natural phenomenon: sky blue, grass green, or dove gray. We make color associations in understanding ourselves, our culture, and the way we create and communicate through color. Cultures often describe colors based upon their locale, for example, Eskimos have many ways to describe white. We approach the changing seasons with different colors in mind, such as autumn colors are often warm and subdued. Finally trends influence color: black in the clothing we wear was ubiquitous from the 1980s to 2010.
Color preferences may be individual and based upon physical body coloring, memorable experiences, family traditions, or fashion. A motivation for individualizing color that is gaining inroads is the “Do It Yourself” “Design It Yourself” response to mass-produced sameness—be it in the home, on the Internet, or in getting dressed. This means taking an active part in and making color decisions ourselves that will influence the outcomes. Changing color changes appearance of products and brings up the issue of shifting from what the machine can do to what the individual can do. Then, too, uses of color in one culture may affect other cultures as products are introduced and sold in other cultural settings than the one in which they were produced. For example, the standard uses of neutrals such as white, black, and gray on appliances, computers, and cars in the West have been considered boring in some adopting cultures, as such products have permeated the globe. The creative response that arises is to individualize such products with color, to make the product more palatable in the adopting culture.
Interpretation of color involves understanding color, its combinations, and recognition of its associated forms. For example, red is a central color that our minds access as a response to a limited range of wavelengths. But red can be understood by itself as the color of blood or arousing excitement, or in terms of how it is combined with other colors, such as red, white, and blue. Such combinations may call to mind a country’s flag and patriotism, and used prominently in national events when just red might not be interpreted in the same way. But designers such as Ralph Lauren also use such combinations specifically because of prior associations that rely on symbolism and tradition. Color has a propensity to trigger memory and can aid in recognition. Remembering surgical tools in various colors helps to account for what tools must leave the room outside the patient. The natural order of the rainbow has been used to order products in visual display.
Meanings associated with colors can develop in unique ways and change based upon context. For example, colors can be used for sociological or political reasons as in tribal identification, gang colors, or soldiers’ uniforms. In the United States, an example of effective public recognition through color is use of a specific hue of a certain pink—a light and intense value red tinged with blue—that is used in the context of building awareness of breast cancer. The pink ribbon looped over and worn on the jacket lapel is recognized by most and associated with support of breast cancer research. Other manufactured products range from pink T-shirts to pink vacuum cleaners, or a Tory Burch pink puffer vest to New Balance running shoes—all in the same recognizable pink. Similarly, the color green has become a symbol of the environmental movement and both the hue itself and its name have come to represent our concern for the earth. But the color green in Ireland or in a hospital surgical setting has entirely different connotations. Such differences reflect upon the use of color in different situations, be they professional or cultural contexts.
Marketing through the use of color is a vital collaboration of color and design. Colors may be identified as “mood colors,” such as bright colors tend to cheer us, or neutral colors to calm us. The mood and the attitudes of those who see us may be affected by the color of clothing we wear, the color of the cell phone we carry, or the colors used in our surroundings, that is, colors to prevent depression or to promote healing. Color is used for brand recognition. Some well-known designers are associated with certain colors. For example, what would Donna Karan do without black, Vivienne Westwood without red, or Georgio Armani without the subdued neutral grays?
In this book color is explored through examples of brands and the role that color plays in the making of a brand. How do color trends originate and then filter through the various design applications of products and communications? Research studies have shown that people may immediately recognize product and corporations via color alone without the associated shapes or words often contained in a brand image, for example, Coca-Cola’s red. Conversely, colors typical of a geographic locale may become a form of local branding.
Trends and forecasting play an influential role in the way we see and identify color. Fashion decades are often identified through colors and movements popular at the time. For example, the 1960s are remembered along with the florescent, acid, and psychedelic colors associated with the youth movement and drug experiences. Consider colors and specific values and intensities that not only become a signature of a specific time period but the wearer. For example, color was introduced into menswear in the 1970s when somber blacks, browns, and navy blues were replaced by brilliant lime greens and reds, as well as colorful patterned fabrics seen in men’s semiformal dinner jackets.
This book will be valued as a college-level textbook in courses related to color: design and human perception, aesthetics, history, and material culture. But the contents of this book are also broadly applicable to professional designers to differentiate and sharply focus the messages of design and marketing, and the general public will come to understand how and why color is so extensively varied and offers such potential to communicate.
Marilyn DeLong and Barbara Martinson