Color
When the phenomena are endless
"There can be no description or theory of color per se," Irwin insists, "when the phenomena are endless." The notion that color can be reduced to a series of codes, to a grammar, or to a form of "mathematics," to use Wittegensetein's term, is, for Irwin, nonsense, since color is dependent on context and ground-up perceptual experience. Beginning with color codes or concepts was to reduce in advance an infinitely wide range of phenomena to a limited set of categories, editing out all specificity in favor of abstraction.
Irwin Fluorescents
In order: Kenny Price, Blue Lou, Legacy, Fourfold, Niagara.
Irwin has explained that he decided to use the fluorescent tubes in the "dumbest" way possible, but, as one critic cautioned, "dumb, it turns out, has a special meaning for him: It's a form so simple that you end up not paying attention to it as a form." Irwin's interest was, rather, in the range of light, color, reflection, and shadow interaction made possible by combining tubes with different hues and finishes by wrapping them with theatrical gels.
In the lee of the sills
The first thing you register here is the dramatic inconsistency in the coloration of the timber cladding the house in Haldenstein: the natural hues of the wood survive only in the lee of the sills, like re-growth along the parties of a head of dyed hair. But a second glance takes in the precision of the cuts made to accommodate the window and the fact that the pine is used in seamless lengths.
A universal correspondence
In 1923 Kandinsky proposed a universal correspondence between the three elementary shapes and the three primary colors: the dynamic triangle is inherently yellow, the static square is intrinsically red, and the serene circle is naturally blue.
The series â˛â â represents Kandinskyâs attempt to prove a universal correlation between color and geometry; it has become one of the most famous icons of the Bauhaus. Kandinsky conceived of these colors and shapes as a series of oppositions: yellow and blue represent the extremes of hot/cold, light/dark, and active/passive, while red is the intermediary between them. The triangle, square, and circle are graphic equivalents of the same polarities.
250. Warm Colors
Problem
The greens and grays of hospitals and office corridors are depressing and cold. Natural wood, sunlight, bright colors are warm. In some way, the warmth of the colors in a room makes a great deal of difference between comfort and discomfort.
Solution
Choose surface colors which, together with the color of the natural light, reflected light, and artificial lights, create a warm light in the rooms.
Hues subdued
Colors in nature are, in general, more subdued than what comes directly from the pencil or the tube of paint. Greens, especially, tend to be a lot browner than we expect.
The palette of nature
"What nature does with its colors is invariablyâthe palette of nature is twice as complicated, at least twice as sophisticated, as anything any artist can ever come up with. On a couple levels.
To start with, there are these amazing combinations of colors, filled with surprises and almost never wrong. I don't know how Nature ever conceived to put, say, those together. But, boy, are they right on the money!"
- ââColors in natureââ
- ââHues subduedââ
Colors in nature
Twice every summer we discussed whether colors in nature could clash.
- ââThe palette of natureââ
- ââHues subduedââ
Color codes
When not compelled to do otherwise, the Braun design teamâs use of color in products was reduced to highly specific areas such as control switches. Restricting the use of color to small points on an otherwise neutral object concentrates its effect, which is shifted away from decoration and towards function, especially when each color is assigned a signal role such as green for âon / off' switches, red for âfmâ and yellow for âphonoâ on hi-fis or yellow for the second hand on clocks and watches.
This color coding of operating details is a primary example of the self-explanatory nature of Braun products.
Sketches
Sketches and written notes.
The deception of color
In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize
that color deceives continually.What counts here â first and last â is not so-called knowledge
of so-called facts, but vision â seeing.Not the what but the how
Our concern is the interaction of color; that is, seeing
what happens between colors.We are able to hear a single tone.
But we almost never (that is, without special devices) see a single color
unconnected and unrelated to other colors.
Colors present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to
changing neighbors and changing conditions.As a consequence, this proves for the reading of color
what Kandinsky often demanded for the reading of art:
what counts is not the what but the how.Disliked colors
We try to recognize our preferences and our aversions â
what colors dominate in our work; what colors, on the other hand,
are rejected, disliked, or of no appeal. Usually a special effort
in using disliked colors ends with our falling in love with them.A cook with taste
Observe the interior and exterior, the furniture and textile decoration
following such color schemes, as well as commercialized color âsuggestionsâ
for innumerable do-it-yourselves.Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
of complementaries, whether complete or âsplitâ, and of triads and
tetrads as well.
They are worn out.Second, no mechanical color system is flexible enough
to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before,
in a single prescribed recipe.Good painting, good coloring, is comparable to good cooking.
Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting
while it is being followed.
And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.Does it have color?
Whether something âhas colorâ or not is as hard to define verbally as are
such questions as âwhat is musicâ or âwhat is musical."Chromatic mutiny
Nevertheless there were a number of colorful appliances produced by Braun, particularly from the late 1960s onwards, when plastics in bright primary colors became fashionable and available.
T3 domino lighter
KMM 2 coffee grinder
HLD 4 hairdryer
KF 145 coffee maker
HT 95 pop-up toasterWhen Ramsâs team used color in such a way, it was uncompromising in its intensity: loud and demanding. The highly reduced forms of the products that it clothed, which had gently rounded edges, smooth opaque surfaces and discreet (usually black) detailing only served to increase this intensity.
"The intention was to create product alternatives for people who wished for strong color highlights in their living environments. This impulse came from marketing - not from design,â says Rams, dissociating himself from this approach. This was one instance where marketing got the upper hand in the decision-making process and the design team had to bow to contemporary fashion.
Indeed, there is a defiant aspect to these chromatic exceptions; they are not so much compromises as mutinous responses. Nevertheless, the resulting products are beautiful objects in their stand-alone way.
A strange calligraphy
Along the sand there will be frisky shadows, that will dance and fall away.
Or, if there is snow, the flames will write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness.Interaction of Color
AÂ Book by Josef Albers- ââThe deception of colorââ
- ââPractice before theoryââ
- ââ50 redsââ
- ââNot the what but the howââ
- ââScotopic seeingââ
- ââIrwin Fluorescentsââ
Better colormaps?
An Article by Mark LibermanA modest sample of alternative ways of coloring the same type of 2-D density plots of rates of F0 change and amplitude change.
Wernerâs Nomenclature of Colours
AÂ Website by Nicholas RougeuxA recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook with new cross references, photographic examples, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.
Color Controversy
AÂ Website by Leo RobinovitchSo some friends and I were talking about colors one day and how we all see colors a bit differently and how that's neat.
But is there a color that is interpreted differently THE MOST? Is there a most controversial color? Well, (if I contrive an ongoing survey and collect data about it), the answer is yes, of course!
The Subtleties of Color
AÂ Series by Robert SimmonThe use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press âapply,â and youâre done. Although we all know itâs not that simple, thatâs often how colors are chosen in the real world. As a result, many visualizations fail to represent the underlying data as well as they could.
Gods of the Word
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.My name
âI am the utterance of my name.â
â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂŠ, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
No less than a Zeus
I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A
/t/
or an/h/
is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Fracturing
If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself
So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
The element becomes a sign
Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?