Today we’re celebrating colour in design, speaking to Adobe’s Rufus Deuchler about the fascinating world of colour perception.
Why is colour subjectivity important for creatives?
Colour is a language, pretty much like typography or composition. Depending on what colours you use, you’re expressing a message. A typical example is if you make something black and yellow in a Western cultural context it means dangerous: keep back and watch out. If you’re going to be using pastel colours, the effect is warmer and more inciting. Depending on what you need to stress in your design you’re going to use different colours for different effects. And in languages there are variations, slang, regional dialects… It’s vast. One colour can mean one thing in one culture, and another can mean something totally different in another. For instance, in some Celtic countries the colour green symbolises bad luck and misfortune, whereas elsewhere green can make us think of a four-leaf clover, and means luck. It’s super interesting, but also super important to bear in mind when designing for a global audience.
The colour wheel is centuries old. Is it’s aim to unify the language of colour?
Absolutely! As humans we need order in something that is complex or chaotic. Colour is like that. The use of a colour wheel is important especially when first learning about design. To find complementary colours, or start working with monochromatic colours. I think the colour wheel is still definitely very important as a guide.It’s a guide, there’s no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of using colour?
No, it’s just a matter of taste… but then there are generally accepted views on what is good and bad taste! That’s definitely influenced by the use of tools like the colour wheel, and from cultural influence. But then maybe a colour combination that I would find horrific, might appeal to somebody else, so there’s always exceptions to any rule. It can also be confusing because from Adobe’s perspective we’re talking about colours that you see on a screen, which are additive colours. That brings us to RGB and CMYK, which are completely different ways that colour is reproduced. All colours that are based on emitting light are called additive colour, and it puts together the colours red, green and blue. Then there’s the reflective colour system that, well, reflects light! The magazine cover in front of you uses reflective colour based on cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Of course, we see differences in the colours when they move from one system to another. Focusing on RGB, if you go into Adobe Colour CC [formerly Adobe Kuler] you can make colour schemes using a colour wheel. What’s more, with Colour CC, you can pick a reflective colour, from ‘real life’, and bring it into CC, converting it into an additive colour and then create a colour theme from it.
So you pick a set of colours from life and bring it into your work?
Adobe Color CC is a capture app, yes. I can use it directly on my smartphone, and capture colours that are around me, maybe a beautiful flower, and I can take colours directly from that image and save them as a colour theme that is then populating my Creative Cloud Libraries. I can use the theme in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and other mobile apps like Adobe Photoshop Sketch CC, or Adobe Illustrator Draw CC. You can use it in different ways. If you go to the site, there’s a beautiful colour wheel where you have some points where you can move over that colour wheel and really define a colour theme until it’s perfect for the work that you want to do. I can create monochromatic colour themes, or use complementary colours, that is coming from opposite sides of colour wheel, or shades of a specific colour…What did you learn from the black and blue dress debate?
Initially, it freaked me out. I thought, “how can anyone see anything else but B&B.” And I asked my son who hadn’t heard anything about it, and he swore that it was white and gold. How is that even possible?! I found it fascinating because it makes you question everything about colour, right?! All the questions got asked and people started thinking about it in a very interesting way…So, the different ways we see colour can be just the way our eyes work?
Absolutely. When you look at the cross section of the human eye, there’s an image going through the cornea, and hitting the iris, through the lens then getting rotated then onto the retina, inverted, and then the brain has to put this all together! Thinking about the complexity of all these steps, plus adding the complexity of colour, it makes total sense that we can’t possibly all see the same thing.
Then there’s colour blindness…
Well actually, I’m a graphic designer with red/green colour blindness. I think around 5 per cent of the male population has it. This is the inability to understand some browns… when red and green get mixed together it gets difficult. In design school I was told, ‘Rufus, you’re never going to be a designer.’ Then I realised that this is not a problem at all. Having this red/green colour blindness gave me other superpowers! For example, the differences in tone. Tonality is something that I see much better than a non-colour blind person. The shades of colours, I perceive much more depth as far as shades… We have shades that go from white to black, all the shades in-between I have a very good sense of how they work, and can express them very well. Colour blindness does not bloke creativity. And for those people who are not colour blind, but want to experience how a colour blind person sees, they can go into Illustrator or Photoshop, into Tool Set up, and choose the Colour Blind option!Designers are also going to see different colours depending on their screens…
You’re talking about colour calibration, and you can chose to make it as simple or complex as you want. What calibration really means is that you take the information from your camera or scanner, your computer and the printer, and make sure there’s colour consistency between all these devices. There’s another step, all of your apps that you use need to be, not calibrated, but respecting the colour profiles that you’ve chosen for the calibration of the device. So it’s almost overwhelming when you think of all the things you need to change to make a total calibrated workflow. I’ve personally always gone for the really simple way of not trusting what I see on the screen, knowing what may happen in the changes to colour.You’ve never calibrated your screen?
No. In my 20 years I’ve never calibrated my monitor. But I knew that specific RGB colours on my screen would look different when printed out in CMYK – it would loose some of its brightness. Colour seems to do that when it goes into four colour printing. However I have always made sure that there was colour ‘consistency’ between my creative applications by choosing a unified colour profile. When we talk about colour we talk about colour spaces… the ability to represent a colour. CMYK, even though it has four colours, is the smallest colour space that we can work with. That’s why when we take a nice, rich, RGB image that looks beautiful on our retina screen and print it in CMYK, it looses something of its edge. That’s because we’re removing a tonne of colour to make it fit on that CMYK colour space. All the colours that are not in that CMYK colour space are described as ‘out of gamut’. These are the colours that we need to be looking for. Photoshop and Illustrator can help us see these colours before we actually go into print.