The Little European E On The Paint Tubes

3596I'd always thought it was a European thing. Turns out I was right, not quite in the way I'd thought, but right sure enough.

There is a symbol to the right of this text; it is a minuscule "e" drawn in a peculiar style. I've seen it on art supplies, specifically paint tubes, for a while. It has to do with a standard for prepackaging weight for products and it turns out it points up a subtle yet significant difference between Europe and the United States of America.

This is what they call the "estimated sign". It is a European standard. Without belaboring things too much, it appears in the same visual field as the weight or volume of the product and it means that the contents won't, on average, be less than the number you see, and for those that are slightly less, that slightly-less will be within an expected tolerance.

The European market, then, is what they call an average fill market. In America, though, that packaged weight is the least you will expect to see in all cases, and for that reason they say that America is a minimum fill market.

The language behind all of it makes even my eyes glaze over; the specifications, as well as the precise specifications for even drafting the symbol can be found on the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_sign. They are intimidatingly complex.

A slightly less abstruse reading can be found at the page https://www.ceway.eu/cosmetic-product-labels-estimated-symbol/, published by CE.way, a consultancy that provides market-oriented regulation and testing advice to the cosmetics industry. It makes the highly interesting point that, while you may see the 'e' on prepackages sold in the USA, since it's for products shipped from withing the EU to within the EU, putting the 'e' on your USA package imported to the EU means little or nothing, especially when one takes a moment to think about making a minimum-fill product jibe with standards for average-fill products.

So why do it? For the same reason any American affects something European: style. It lends an air of sophistication.

But that's the story behind the 'e'.

And that, as they say, is a thing you know now.

Can You Find The Eleven In The Big Ten?

2062.There's a artistic trick called trompe l'oeil (close-enough English pronounciation "trump loy", literally "trick of the eye"), which is an artist's way of using implied perspective to make a flat thing look three-dimensional; the painting actually seems to offer a window into another world, to tell a deeper story, to mean more than it seems to mean.

Logo designers go for this. It's not necessarily a triumph of design to have a logo tell a story, but it is wicked clever to have them do it subtly. The inimitable Larry Fire of The Fire Wire pointed me to an article at the Graphic Design Forum that illustrates logo design trompe l'oeil-age.

For instance, consider the design of the Big Ten Conference's logo, pictured right. The oldest Division I collegiate athletic association in America, it has a brand-recognition second to absolutely nobody (except maybe the Ivy League). But in 1990, Penn State joined the constellation, making the membership not ten schools, but eleven.

Big Eleven conference?

Well, no. Just like 20th Century Fox didn't change its name in the year 2001 (and the 20th Century Lanes here in SE Portland off SE 92nd Avenue and Powell Blvd retains it suddenly-rustic name) you don't mess with success. You design it into the logo. By now you should see the number 11 in the BIG TEN, but if you don't, look at the negative space on either side of T.

There you go. Logo trompe l'oeil. It tells a bigger story and makes the logo appropriate even if the name is no longer.

Via Larry Fire, then, here's a bunch of similar logos. It's pretty cool tour, and not all of them are of Randian brilliance, but many come close, and have the same deft subtletly that allows the logo to tell the story without a lot of fuss, bother, or mess (including the Toblerone bear, which I documented as well).

Technorati Tags: logo design, graphic design

TriMet's Iconic Past: Service Sector Symbols

2042.In the last entry, I mentioned something about TriMet Service Sectors. That brought that though to the fore, and I decided I wanted to obsess on that for just a posting.

One of the things I was a big fan of, and that I was sorry to see go, was the idea of color-and-symbol coded service areas. I don't remember when this was inagurated – I think it goes back to the 1970s, when the Transit Mall (known on maps as The Portland Mall) was originally constructed.

It was a great and playful way of organizing a district of hundreds of square miles and about one hundred routes, both regular service and rush hour service, into big chunks making it really unnecessary to know a priori where a route was to find its terminals on the Mall.

Like a big, crazy pie, with all slices converging on downtown Portland, the greater Portland Area was divided into seven sectors, with a corresponding color/symbol icon – each symbol reflecting on the Portland area's connection with nature.

The sectors worked out thusly, from the NW and going clockwise, between loosely-defined boundaries:

The Red Fish sector covered NW and N Portland, from approximately the crest of Forest Park east to a line more or less alone Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd/Union Avenue. Locations in this area included Saint Johns, the Portsmouth area and the North Portland Peninsula, the trendy Northwest district, the and the Northwest industrial district.

The Purple Raindrop (no, not "Purple Rain", no joy for Prince fans here) covered an arc from approximately Martin Luther King Jr Blvd to a line more or less parallel to and a little south of Northeast Sandy Blvd. Destinations in this area included Portland International Airport, Parkrose, Hollywood, Woodlawn, the golf courses along Columbia Boulevard, Rocky Butte, and classier Northeast areas such as Irvington and Alameda.

The Blue Snowflake had at its northern boundary that aforementioned line south of Sandy and swept down to a line more or less between Burnside and Southeast Stark Street. East of what would eventually be I-205, the area covered everything from Burnside/Stark up to the Columbia River, all the way out to Gresham. With the advent of MAX service and the establishment of a full-service Transit Center at Gateway, all Blue Snowflake routes terminated there and were removed from thier Mall stops, those stops becoming local service/Union Station service.

The Brown Beaver sector served in the main the working-class SE part of Portland, specifically that part south of the Burnside/Stark corridor and east of the Sellwood/Moreland area, extending also all the way out to Gresham; essentially any route that was going to SE but wasn't eventually bound for Milwaukie and points south.

Like the Red Fish, The Green Leaf sector covered an area on both sides of the Willamette River, serving Johns Landing, Sellwood, the eastern 2/3rds of Lake Oswego, Milwaukie, the suburban corridor along McLoughlin Blvd including Jennings Lodge, Oak Grove, River Road and such, and also such SW desinations as Tualatin and Wilsonville. If you wanted to go to Marylhurst College or Canby, you boarded a Green Leaf route.

The Yellow Rose took in the neighborhoods of inner and outer SW Portland, such as Hillsdale, Multnomah Village, Garden Home, the Vermont Street area, the Washington Square Mall, PCC Sylvania and Lewis and Clark College, and outlying communities like King City, Tigard, and Sherwood. It also served suburban SW areas that lay, generally speaking, south of Scholls Ferry Road.

To complete the circle, the Orange Deer sector took in everything from about Scholls Ferry Road north to the Tualatin Mountains (Forest Park). Everything along the TV Hwy/Canyon Road corridor and the Sunset Hwy was in this district. This took in Beaverton, Cedar Hills, Cedar Mill, the Cornell Road corridor, Bethany, Tanasbourne, Aloha, Hillsboro, and Forest Grove. If you were bussing it to the Zoo or OMSI (when it was up on the hill), you took the 63-Washington Park, from the Orange Deer shelters.

The system changed from time to time. As mentioned, when the MAX corridor was developed, the Gateway Transit center became the Blue Snowflake terminal, and that stop was removed from Mall shelters. But in its heyday, the Portland Mall had four of each stop down Southwest Fifth and Sixth Avenues:

Shelters on Southwest Fifth had terminals for Brown Beaver, Green Leaf, Yellow Rose, and Orange Deer sectors, or those routes going south and east or south and west;

Shelters on Southwest Sixth had terminals for Purple Raindrop, Blue Snowflake, and Red Fish sectors, or those routes going north and east or north and west. There were still two terminals to the block, and the unused terminal was used for local stops and buses going to Union Station. After Blue Snowflake left the Mall, those stops were also used for Mall arrivals only.

Sometime between 2000 and 2002, the sector symbol icons were gradually phased out, sadly. I say sadly because I thought they were chaming and not quite as dated as whoever updated the TriMet look thought they were. They also gave a level of usefulness and intitutiveness to the system that I don't quite find with the current system's graphic treatment. They were so interesting that, for a time, each in its own way, Salem and Eugene's transit systems implemented thier own color/area codeing, Eugene's LTD actually going as far as creating thier own color/icon match (my favorite was the Purple Rhododendron).

TriMet may have moved on from this, but I still fondly remember it ... and miss it a bit. It was fun and creative ... quintessentially Portland.

Technorati Tags: TriMet, TriMet graphic design, transit graphic design, transit map design, Portland Transit

TriMet Map Cover Designs: 1995, 1996

2041.Now we move up to the years '95 and '96. Here they are:

The designs from these years are very different in style and mood.

The 1995 map is very businesslike and celebrates the most charming feature of the TriMet graphic oeurve from prior to 2001; the TriMet Sector Symbols. I'm saving the meat of that idea for another article, but the idea is that, like a pie, the landscape was divided into seven radial segments, all pointing toward The Portland Mall, going, from the north clockwise: Purple Raindrops, Blue Snowflake, Brown Beaver, Green Leaf, Yellow Rose, Orange Deer, Red Fish. The sector lines were grouped into their respective shelters along Fifth And Sixth Avenues on the transit mall, and the lines serving each shelter along with the sector symbol could be clearly seen on illuminated signage that was visible from at least a half block away.

The genius of this system can hardly be overstated. If you're unfamiliar with the system, all you need remember is the color and symbol of the route that brought you in, look for the sign, and you're halfway there. If you do know the system and you just want to be "in the moment", just look for the sign. The simple shapes were charming and the colors were interesting.

The 1996 design doesn't invite too much commentary, and that's a statement on the strength and appropriateness of its look. There is no overestimating what appropriately-chosen type, a screened-back monochrome approach, and simple graphic elements can do. This design is niether too much nor too little, but it's just right.

Technorati Tags: TriMet, Transit Graphic Design, Map design, graphic design,

The Evolution Of The TriMet MAX Map 3: Along The Red Line

2036.2001 was the first year of a new Century, the first year of a new age, and the first year that Portland had a light rail system that had, effectively, two lines.

The Airport MAX line opened then, and proved immediately as popular as the rest of the system. Arrivals at PDX were treated to light rail service right at the terminal doorstep.

Airport MAX began as a service from PDX going only as far as downtown. Along the way, perhaps with the prospect of future service expansions in mind, TriMet hit upon a color scheme: the main east and west line of MAX, Hillsboro to Gresham, was to be dubbed the Blue line; the downtown to Airport route, the Red line. Here's what one of the first maps looked like:

Click on the map to embiggen. The abstractization of Portland continues. With the necessity to express the physical reality of one station serving two lines, a level of sophistication occurrs; the stops, which are circles on the lines, expand into cartouche-like ovals where they have to span the two lines. See the following illustration dragging and panning in the Picasa Web Album picture browser is too much of a hassle (It's not exactly intutive, is it?):

Each station serving both lines is taken as a given, but the oval station markers is a rather urbane touch, and echoes the station icons seen on such worldly maps as the New York Subway maps and the London Underground. Amenities are shown by icons which would be familiar to any world traveller. The ends of the lines are tied down by large colored dots. Fare zones are gradated boxes.

Later this service was expanded westward to the Beaverton Transit Center, and maps evenually started featuring bars labelled with travel times between stations and along major sections. The station labels at a 45 degree angle also contribute to the sophisticated feel of the map. Though largely a schematic, in greater ways this still has some fidelity with the geography, at least in as much as the branch along 1st Avenue downtown parallels the river and turns right to cross it.

This abstraction was to become even more prominent in the next map, which will be posted soon.

PS: A couple commenters in a previous entry noted that David Bragdon, current METRO Council President, may or may not have had something to do with getting the TriMet Map and Guide series started. I'm going to get an email winging his way and see what he has to say about that (I ought to be able to find an email contact for him on the METRO web page, I should think)

Technorati Tags: TriMet, Portland Transit, Map Design, graphic design, transit graphic design

TriMet Map Cover Designs: 1993, 1994

2035.We move on to the next two TriMet Map cover designs, this time: 1993 and 1994.

While MAX is still a big hit with the transit fans, it has become part of the landscape. It's now being incorporated in as just another part of one of America's most celebrated transit systems. The designs change to suit.

The 1993 design is a cheery, blocky, fun thing full of primary color and active play. Everything you might use to get round the town is included as part of a great palette of transportation options: bus, bike, light rail, the personal car has a place still, car/vanpooling, and your own two feet can serve to get you about this metro-area-on-a-human-scale.

The 1993 design is joyous and inviting. It reminds one of child's play blocks or a pleasant day spent at preschool. Portland's fun ... and TriMet can be a part of that!

The 1994 edition really dials back and goes for restraint. My guess is that badge down in the lower left: a bit of dignity, please, as we celebrate our 25th Anniversary of The Nation's Best Transit System. I sincerely enjoy the restrained color palette, the violet suggesting a sort of luxury and "having arrived", and the screened-back logos forming a sort of tessellated pattern that wouldn't look half-bad as a wallpaper (on your screen or on your wall).

Technorati Tags: TriMet, Portland Transit, Portland History, Map Design, graphic design, transit graphic design

TriMet Map Cover Designs: 1984, 1985

2030.TriMet is known for having a neato-mosquito way of having any schedule you'll need to use as well as complete transit information in a democratic, dead-tree form that I've found pleasing over the years.

The Tri-Met Map and Guide has been published annually for over 25 years now (I'm guessing – I really don't know when it was first done) and is still being published, even in this age of PDAs and iPhones and wireless devices with tiny screens.

This is a good thing. Wireless devices are nifty and no mistake, but not everyone has such a device or needs one, really.

Here begins a tour of my collection of map cover designs. The book and map have had a new design every year for most of the last twenty-odd years I've used the system, and for many of those years (with some gaps) I've gotten myself every one. This time, we look at 1985 and 1986. You ought to be able to clicky to embiggen the following graphic.

In 1984, Tri-Met (remember in those days there was a hyphen in the name) had just debuted two new things: A new color scheme and design (reflected in the "sunset" stripes you see on the 1984 cover) replacing the silver-and-orange of up until then (the current design that TriMet's updating from? This is when it started) and a new technology that was hoped to move Tri-Met to being a cashless fare system.

"America's Fastest Buses" referred to the time you were going to save from pawing about for change for the bus because what Tri-Met wanted you to do was purchase a ticket before the ride. You can do that now, of course, but the idea here was that each and every bus had a ticket validator on, which meant if you had a single ticket or a 10-ride ticket (which was this long bit of cardstock with notches which the validator clipped off whilst printing the time of boarding on) you just stick it in the validator, punch it, and go. Upside: no irritating transfer waste to clutter up your purse or backpack. Downside: no convenient transfer to repurpose later as a bookmark.

I tried the validator and ticket system and found it nifty. Sadly, the public rejected it in droves.

In 1985, Tri-Met was just about to undertake actual construction of MAX – which didn't even have that name yet, we all just called it "Tri-Met Light Rail". Excitement was building then for it, and everyone was eager to see it start.

In downtown, Southwest Morrison and Yamhill Streets were used as the princpal cross-Mall access for lines that went straight east or west out of downtown – lines like the 15-Belmont, which was known then as the 15–Mt. Tabor – either way, they all went up Belmont to Mount Tabor, so six of one, you know.

Tri-Met used a zone-system for determining fares in those days, as today, though there were more zones-five instead of three. Zones 1, 2, and 3 were as they are now; Zone 4 took in areas such as East County (the area between I-205 and Gresham), Oak Grove-Jennings Lodge, and Aloha, and Zone 5 ecompassed places such as Hillsboro proper, Oregon City/West Linn/Gladstone, Gresham, and points beyond.

Technorati Tags: Portland, Portland Maps, Portland History, Map Design, Transit Design, Tri-Met, TriMet

Color vs Mood: That 70s Ring

2018.The idea of color matching mood is one that apparently runs deep within our own Western culture. And nowhere does that idea have a more whimsical fruition than that iconic bit of 1970s mass-market jewelry couture, the mood ring.

This trifle, a staple of the 1970s – a decade that could still glimpse the free-love and emotion vibes of the 1960s and the Summer of Love – purported to disclose the mood of the wearer via a color change. A typical rundown might go as follows:

• Black Very stressed
• Gray Very Nervous
• Amber Anxious and/or uncertain
• Green Calm
• Teal Calm and relaxed
• Blue Happy
• Indigo or Violet Happy, romantic or passionate

Some of the mentioned colors may align with ones' personal subjective impressions of color, and some may govern ones' subsequent reactions to a certain range of colors. Some may simply make little or no sense. Follow this link for a nearly-insanely detailed list of possible meanings.

The rings worked on a very simple principle: body heat. The usually-inexpensive rings had a layer of liquid crystal bonded to a surface over which was mounted polished glass or some inexpensive transparent gem. The liquid crystal responded to changing body heat which was held to be in specific response to specific moods, refracting light and changing the reflected color as body heat changed ... as mood changed.

What I find interesting here is that many of the colors listed correspond to already-held assumptions about color in Western society – blue, green, and cool colors were held to connote clamness and cheerfulness, whereas colors such as black, which is found in situations of gravity and grimness, connote stress and strain.

The connection to mood and bodily response is one whose validity is open to question, depending on one's point of view. The interesting thing about the mood ring is that instead of color determining mood, mood determines color – which is a thing that wouldn't occur to us in the gestalt if we didn't think that color did indeed, somehow, influence mood.


Technorati Tags: mood ring, color and mood

TH.2058 @ The Tate Modern: Using Typography And Color To Set Mood And Expectation

2011.I've been investigating how color influences mood, and I've made no secret about my love and appreciation for type, which also influences mood and expectations using appeals to style.

Recently (via IO9.com, if memory serves me correctly) I learnt of an unusually, delightfully dark and twisted exhibition at Britains Tate Modern museum of art. There, artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has mounted, in the Turbine Hall, an installation called TH.2058.

Apparently inspired in large part by SF and disaster tales (I also sense something of the British "cosy catastrophe" here) the Turbine Hall has been turned into a shelter complete with 200 bunk beds, a place where the inhabitants of the world 50 years from now can come for relief from a catastrophic realignment of climate:

It rains incessantly in London – not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires. They dream about infinitely dry deserts.

This continual watering has had a strange effect on urban sculptures. As well as erosion and rust, they have started to grow like giant, thirsty tropical plants, to become even more monumental. In order to hold this organic growth in check, it has been decided to store them in the Turbine Hall, surrounded by hundreds of bunks that shelter – day and night – refugees from the rain.

The bunks are strewn with books by Vonnegut, Dick, and Ballard, treated to resist the mouldering that the high humidity will perforce require to have happen.

The SF novel metaphor, for me, been realized in the type, color palette, and vision for the printed and web materials. The view, when surfing into the place, is confronted with this:

The type, with its utter artificial geometry, speaks to me of the covers of "cerebral" SF paperback or independent, small-budget films (all the more ironic given the name "UniLever", but there you go about juxtaposition). The yellow of the type and the muted blues, something that looks like a strip taken out of a photo of the exhibition, becomes something of a abstract, like the ones on all those paperback SF novels out of the 60s and 70s.

The place the metaphor really gets realized is in the posters:

...the design of which I regact to much like some of the covers of some of the handful of British imported SF paperbacks I happen to own.

You may have your own opinion on whether or not the artist (if you surfed the link to the exhibit's web page) succeeded at evoking a wrecked enviroment of 50 years hence, but I think the SF-novel vibe has been transmitted forward admirable.

Just the right type and palette, and you have a mood and an atmosphere.

Technorati Tags: Tate Modern, TH.2058, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, art exhibitions, art installations, SF-inspired Art, Type Design, color design, print design, web design

Colors In Hyperspace

2001.From color wheels to the Wilcox Bias Wheel we've gotten theoretical. Now get ready to go seriously abstruse.

Just as the inhabitants of Flatland know there is a third dimension above the two-dimensional world they live in but can't comprehend, the world of the flat 2-D color wheel tells just half of the story. There is a way to arrange color values along a three-dimensional rationale.

Color can be quantified three ways:

1. Every color has a hue, or its essential color. When we say Yellow, we are talking hue.
2. Every color is also modified by its value. This is how light or dark the color is. A simple value scale is a gradient from black to white through tones of gray. Art students typically are asked to create 10-step value scales as an exercise.
3. And, every color has a chroma. This is how "colorful" your color is, how yellow your yellow is; when artists speak of saturation, this is what they're saying The most colorful color is, for instance, that yellowest yellow – the least colorful color is gray – if you take all the yellow out of your yellow. Colors with low key chroma are dull and gray, and this is the same for all colors.

Just there exist three axes we can use to construct a 3-D conception of colors and how they relate to each other.

We've gone to the next level; welcome to color hyperspace.

Originally, color theorist Otto Runge (ca 1810) concieved of a sphere an idea that was forwarded by Johannes Itten later, perhaps reasoning via the love of the human mind for symmetrical depictions of natural things. Ostwald, even later, depicted the color space as a double-cone.

The flaw in this reasoning has to do with human perception. When plotted on a 3-D solid, one would assume that the pure colors would line up about the equator of the solid, and this is not the case:

The problem with both the sphere and the symmetrical cone conceptions of colour space is that, as we have just seen, different hues reach their maximum chroma at different tonal levels.  Putting all of the pure colours on the equator of the solid ensures that the vertical dimension does not represent lightness. Consequently neither the Runge-Itten sphere nor the Ostwald double cone is a true hue-chroma-lightness space. If the vertical dimension of the solid is to represent lightness, then we need in some way to tilt the colour wheel through space, so that yellow occupies a high position opposite light grey and blue occupies a low position opposite dark grey.

So if your axis, your value scale, is to work, you also have to respect that the purest colors will not occur at the same values. The symetrical solid will not work truly.

In order to make a solid work, an irregular solid will work. Purest blue has a lower value than purest yellow, so the solution turned out (through the work of various color theorists staring ca 1880, culminating in the work of a certain Albert Henry Munsell in the early 20th) to be a skewed double cone, something we call today the Munsell Color Solid. Above and to the right should be a image from Wikipedia giving the basics (and click here to see the big version or click on the illustration itself). Here, from David Briggs article at HueValueChroma The Dimensions Of Color is an illustration that really spoke to me about it. You can probably find others yourself with teh Google:

Illustration copyright David Briggs, included for illustration only.
Creator retains full rights to this illustration.

When smoothed out, it looks like a squished globe. The plot in the lower right there really makes the concept come up. As you can see, from up to down everything gets darker. On the lower right of the 3-D display, note that the blue there is the bluest blue; on the upper left, they yellowest yellow is of a significantly higher value. The system is consistent, respects its own rules, and works.

It is not necessarily likely that you'll use the Munsell solid directly, but like the most abstruse philosophy, the thinking behind is presumably underlies the color theory that the layman is most familiar with. It is data that will probably help you a little bit in deciding on using colors based on the qualities you actually see them with.

Here's a few links for you:

• This is Wikipedia's Article on the Munsell.
• This is the full page at HueValueChroma that is by David Briggs and explains the color solid-and why it is the way it is-very well. It went into my research for this post majorly, and I'm am grateful to it for this.
• This is Wikipedia's article on Color Solids,showing some of the early attempts at them.

Technorati Tags: Color, Color theory, Color solids, Munsell Color System

The Wilcox Color Bias Wheel: Yellow and Blue Don't Make Green? (Updated)

1996.In my quest to understand color better I've collected a great deal of references. One of them, and one I commend to anyone at least to push the envelope of their color thinking.

Michael Wilcox is one of the new colorists who has some views which seem bombastic but have "bang-bang" headlines to get your attention then shows eminent and solid logic that even the tyro and the layman and the beginner can grok.

But Blue and yellow don't make green? Strange thing to say, especially due to the conventional wisdom as due to the color wheels we've seen certainly seem to solidly suggest that they do. If you take out your paints and play, you pick a good-looking blue and a good-looking yellow and they sure do seem to go to green, or something that looks like a good green.

What might not be obvious to the beginner though is that color theory is predicated upon idea, perfect color. The red, blue, and yellow primaries we toss about in discussing color like so much grade-school tempera are in fact perfect pure ideals: the red we think about is the absolute red, the yellow and the blue also absolute.

Of course, nothing is perfect. In reality, no such thing exists. No matter how primary you red paint is going to be, there's going to be a semmingly-infinitesimal about of yellow or blue; in every blue, a tiny bit of yellow and red, and in every yellow, a tiny bit of red and blue. Moreover, of these combinations, say, in a red, there's going to be a preponderance of one or the other of the other two primaries–more of the blue than the yellow.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that all primary-color paints are subtly biased one way or the other toward one secondary or the other. Every red is either subtly violet-red or orange-red; every blue is either subtly violet-blue or green-blue; every yellow is either subtly green-yellow or orange-yellow. Starting out you may not notice this, but as you get better at looking at color, you'll start to see it. Select any two different-but-similar primary colors, lay them out on a ground and compare, and the result may become instantly apparent.

This will open your eyes. It opened mine wide.

The illustration at right s the result Mr. Wilcox came up with to abstract the entire concept, and it does it with astounding clarity. It resembles our classic color wheel in that you have red, yellow, and blue primaries, and orange, violet, and green secondaries. But see the arrows and note that the red on the side of the orange is orange-red whereas the red on the side of the violet is violet-red. This is actually the state of the primary colors you're likely to run into as a painter, be it oil, watercolor, or what have you.

It opens the door to a system where knowing your colors and their biases means mixing color is a thinking process rather than a chance process. As Wilcox himself says in the book Blue And Yellow Don't Make Green:

To define red, yellow, and blue as primaries is only true in a rough and ready way – leading to rough and ready color mixing skills.

If you're trying to learn color theory and plain on painting, you need to at least acquaint yourself with Michael Wilcox's work. His School of Color is a commercial concern that will sell you books and materials that will do the trick, or at least find yourself a copy of Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green and let the information sink in. It's all so very logical and interesting that a whole lot of things quickly become possible to you.

Update: I see I'm not the only one that sees this book and Michael Wilcox's work as important. Canadian artist Michael King also was impressed, for mostly the same reasons. Wilcox's insight into color and how it works may indeed have been a quantum leap in how artists see and work with color.

Sadly, the review of the book is pretty shallow (sincerely sorry to say, Mr. King). If you're serious about paints, you know by the time you've gotten to Wilcox's book why paints work on the page and the insight isn't so much how the paints work but why color biases exist and why that's important (there is no such thing as a pure primary in paint and how to use that as a basis for color thinking and mixing).

But I do appreciate the updated cover design. Very smart.

Technorati Tags: Color bias, color bias wheel, color wheel, Michael Wilcox, School of Color

Filed Under: The Color Initiative

1982.For those who wonder, I am creating a new label for filing my posts about color, of which there will be more, and related to a project I'm nurturing under careful development.

This label will the The Color Initiative. My main thrust is color and mood and what I can find out about it, but the thing about color theory is that if you dig your beak into it just a little, a whole lot starts presenting itself.

It's my public diary about my exploration of color, and, as usual, everyone is invited along.

Technorati Tags: Color, Color design, color theory, The Color Initiative, The ZehnKatzen Times, ZehnKatzen

Color In The News: Gamblin's Unique Torrit Gray

1978.When going over what I could find out about color today, I was pleasantly surprised that not only was color in the news, but that it was a well-regarded Oregon maker of world-famous oil paints that was making the news.

Gamblin Artists Colors, I've the impression, is a company in the tradition of the colormen of the 16th and 17th centuries–utterly committed to providing artists with the best-concoted oil paints. Oil paints in and of themselves are a fascinating medium, whether or not it's your medium of choice (what painting I do I do in watercolor), and are, as far as I am aware, a very simple thing; you mix powdered pigments (some of them quite nasty and made from heavy-metals) and linseed oil.

Gamblin brings their "A" game by committing utterly to not only quality but also by a committment to being kind to the environment–very wise considering the qualities of some of the pigments, and very appropriate, being an Oregon company. In their studio, an efficient filtration system removes any particulate matter using products from a company called Donaldson Torit. Throughout the manufacturing and sample process, doubtlessly samples and bits of paint are discarded. Add all this waste together, colorwise, and what do you get?

Gray. In the ideal paint world, when you mix a great many colors together, the colors do not necessarily sum up to black; what they do is neutralize each other (an ideal red mixed with an ideal violet, for instance, being complementary (note they are 180 degress away from each other on the color wheel) cancel each other out to the degree they are ideal, resulting in, not black but gray).


If you mix together all the paint-leavings from around the studio and the particulate strained out of the air in the Torit filters, the result is, apparently, a luminous, somewhat pearly gray, with a green note. John Foyston of The Big O tells the story:

Each February, cardboard drums of pigment powder trapped by the factory's Donaldson Torit air filter are added to an oil base and buckets of waste paint, then run through the roller mill that gives Gamblin paints their trademark silky texture. Torrit Grey (with an extra "r" to avoid any trademark infringement) is the result, and it's packed into date-coded 37-milliliter tubes marked "always complimentary, not for sale" and then given away -- 11,000 of them last year -- to artists, students and teachers starting every Earth Day.

Torrit Grey is always free and it's always gray, because that's what happens when you mix together pigments from the dozens of different paints that Gamblin makes and sells to artists around the world. But don't think that gray is a synonym for boring: Any artist worth her palette knife knows that gray is a many-splendored thing. Far from being simply black and white, gray has a range of hues and shades -- they are the mid-tones that make up much of our visual world.

So it should be available in your local gentlemany art supply emporium pretty soon now. Locally I trust Art Media and Utrecht for new art supplies. You will, likely, not find this at your local Michael's, but I might be wrong about that.

Something else that occurred to me was that the Gamblin company (and, by extension, Mr Gamblin himself) are very canny marketers. Each Torrit Gray tube is as individual as what sold that year, and each are valuable in and of itself as subtly distinctive and individual.

It's a quirkiness that lends itself to amazing self-expression. The Gamblin concern even runs a contest each year for the most creative work produced by an artist using Gamblin Torrit Gray, White, and Black oils. Using these three colors is a bit of a challenge, because instead of using color, which, even when inexpertly-mixed, can tell a very subjective story with relative ease, using just black, white, and gray means you work only with value–the relative whiteness or blackness of a thing. As it happens (and this I've found true when you reduce your canon or your working tools to minimum) limiting your range to simply values seems to infuse even more creativity, resulting in works that are even more moving and compelling than you'd think. Gamblin's current gallery of Torrit Gray competition works can be found here; if they change it, just go to the Gamblin page and look up Torrit Gray.

Gamblin has a reputation of care and committment I find admirable. Torrit Gray is a brilliant stroke of genius. If Robert Gamblin only did what he did for oil paints to watercolors, I just shudder to think what would result.

Visit the Gamblin company here.

View the Oregonian article here, complete with a nifty video about how they do it.

(illustrations were taken from the Gamblin site for purposes of illustration only. All copyrights and rights obtain to them)

Technorati Tags: Gamblin, Torrit Gray, oil paints, best enviromental practices, Oregon Companies

A Sort Of Inscrutable Color/Mood Graph

1976.As part of my researches into the intersection of color and mood, I stumbled on this chart. Follow the below link to view it.

Color Mood Chart

It's a little inscrutable. It's not clear how one might use or or how the list below maps to the diagram up top, but it does suggest connections.

Moreover, I'm finding charts that seem to be in agreement. It's hard to say if it's a group-think thing, or perceptions reinforcing preconcieved notions. The trouble with such suggestve things is that we cross-associate a great deal of things in our heads, and no two people, no matter how similar in overall outlook they may be, are really wired exactly the same. The color blue may suggest the same overall thing to the notional you versus me, but it does not mean that while the notional you might find blue with experiential biases toward happy things, I might find it biased toward sad or indifferent or not as happy as you.

What verbiage! I just barely avoided not wading through it.

In this list, for example:

Blue represents peace, tranquility, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, confidence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, loyalty, sky, water, cold, technology, and depression

From the color mood chart linked above, we have Blue meaning:

• RELAXED
• AT EASE
• CALM
• LOVABLE
  

There is some congruence.

I'm still trying to find any scientific color study (you know, like that one in The Andromeda Strain (the better one made in the 70s, not that recent abomination) that told the engineers what colors to paint the walls on the underground WildFire lab) and will report back soon on this. I'm sure it's just around the corner.

Technorati Tags: design, graphic design, color design, color theory, design theory

Color Wheels Through History

1977.Something I didn't know until recently was that the concept of the Color Wheel itself–the flash of genius that caused someone to realize that you could arrange the producible colors in a logical wheel that not only displayed the natural progression but also turned the idea of color combining into an accessable thinking thing–blazed in the mind of none other than Sir Isaac Newton.

Not to belabor the point overmuch, but this is your general basic additive RYB color wheel. It's more than a logical progression for colors but a guide on how to produce more. To cover the obvious just for the sake of completeness, you start with your primaries–Red, Yellow, and Blue. These are the primaries, the colors from which all others flow and which cannot be further reduced. Exactly halfway between these colors are Green (Yellow+Blue), Orange (Yellow+Red) and Violet (Red+Blue), made with ideal equal proportions of the ideal primaries. Rounding out (if you'll excuse) the primaries and the adjacent secondaries produce the tertiaries.

In practice, of course, there's no such thing as an ideal, perfect primary. every color you get from a tube, crayon, or pencil has a very subtle bias, which is an idea I've lived with for a while and will write on very shortly.

The reason I wrote all the obviousness above is because the idea of the color wheel is a natural poetry that appeals. It's such a simple thing and works so very brilliantly, it's the most simple and effective guide to how to get what you want out of what you got ... it's born in logic and then transcends logic.

And I can't believe how highfalutin' I've gotten all of a sudden over the simple color wheel but I do whenever I realize what a quantum leap it was. I'd like to have been in the lab when Newton hit upon this. Well, that and when he figured out how to make them cookies (mmm, Fig Newtons(™ probabaly))!).

The reason I visited the color wheel is that I wanted to look through history. Wikipedia, while not 100% trustworthy, seems to have good examples.

This, for one, is Newtons original color wheel, diagrammed, correlated with musical notes and astrological symbols for planets (see, I said it was all kind of subjective):

Note, interstingly, that Newton came up with only seven colors. The color wheel's evolved since it was devised. As a matter of fact, let me direct your attention to Boutet's wheels, which came in seven and twelve color flavors:

Ahh, cherubs and unnecessary illustration. This dates from the 18th C, 1708 to be exact, so this was probably sehr teuer, if you catch my German drift. Not too many could have afforded the book that contained it.

Speaking of the German, even the great Goethe got into the act:

This from his 1810 work, Theory of Colours.

This color circle, from a 1904 book, wouldn't look to out-of-place in an art manual in modern times:

It also ID's the colors by initialisms around the rim. Very useful.

Actuallly preparing a color wheel should be something I will do very soon now, since it's simply fun playing with paint, and something I will post here as soon as I can get it up.

There are a couple of other nifty wheel designs to be seen at the Wikipedia entry here.

Technorati Tags: color theory, color wheel, color circle, color, color design

Color and Mood, Part 2: What Does Green Suggest On A Map?

1965.Clear your mind of as many preconceptions about color vs perception as you can, and look at this map for a few minutes (which I sourced from here)

Now that you've had a chance to look at it, What's the overwhelming sense that you get? If you sense colors as dquivalent ot temperatures, as I do, you feel attracted to the green areas because they speak of coolness, especially when contrasted against the buff and textured areas.

You'd be partially correct ... but not wholly so. Naturally, the areas nearer the water that are green tend to be the most temperate, but the area in the lower-left–California's Sacramento River Valley–can get scorching hot in the summer. And, while the area around the Columbia River curling east and north into the Washington interior is green, anyone who lives in the agricultural areas of northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington will tell you that cool lushness is anything but the order of the day during much of the year. The choice of color does communicate a sense of sparseness in the hieights though, however, in the Snake River Basin, which is a buff-yellow near the river itself, the grasslands frequently go to green where there is much irrigation.

But such is the drawback of using color to indicate altitude. Note, this is not a criticism, just an observation. For as many trained in art know, colors have a subjective "warmness" and "coolness"; a red-violet is warm, a blue-green is cool.

This is actually quite an apt color scheme. I recall US maps from grade school, and if you went to school in the good ol' U.S. of A., you know what I mean; lowlands were colored green and gradated to a rather aggressive red the higher up you went. The highlands seemed veritable infernos!

The colors tell a story about the highlands that may be consistent but may not be true. Again, this is not the fault of the cartographer, and nobody's fault really–it's just the way we're all wired.

Since color suggests so very much subjectively, we need to use it with consideration and care in our logo, print, and web design.

Technorati Tags: graphic design, color design, color, designing with color

Color and Mood, Part 1: What Color Goes With What Mood?

1962.Color, to express an obvious point, is a subjective thing.

Our responses to color are conditioned by context, present mood, expectiations, and culture. What color connotes in one culture is different than what another says about it. For instance, in Western Culture, the color white can be thought to connote purity and "good" and might therefore induce a cheerful, sympathetic response in the viewer.

On the other hand, in Chinese culture, white is the color of death and funerals, and use of white as a design element will probably send the wrong message.

By way of anecdote, colors such as red and orange seem to sharpen the appetite. You find them used widely in steakhouses and Italian restaurants–it's not by accident, perhaps that the stereotypical checked tablecloth in Italian restaurants have a great deal of red on them.

A personal story might also illustrate. I adore pork chops, and some time ago, my wife cooked a singularly spectacular meal centered on chops. She loves to experiment, so she used some fruit juice to cook the chops in. The resulting color–a deep, rich, reddish-brown that diffused upward through the meat–rang so many appetite bells that I still remember the sensousness of eating this perfectly-otherwise-ordinary pork chop even today.

Color has power, and our reactions can be–well, colored–by the hues we use.

What colors are best for what uses? People like the good folk at Pantone have been researching this for years and can give you answers. With this post, I'm embarking on a personal research program in pursuit of updating a logo for a client (whose responsible in a large way for getting me back on my computing legs).

I don't know if that's what he meant to do, but it's a scary thing and an exciting thing. Color is ephemeral and subjective, and seems notoriously difficult to quantify. In the process, I'll be rooting out and finding every study I can. At the end, I don't think I'll have a definitive statement on color, but I expect I will have had a very wide adventure.

I'd like to call it a series of white papers, but that seems unfair somehow.

Technorati Tags: graphic design, color, designing with color