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 ▲■● represents Kandinsky’s 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 invariably—the 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!"
Colors in nature
Twice every summer we discussed whether colors in nature could clash.
Color codes
When not compelled to do otherwise, the Braun design team’s 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 ‘on / off' switches, red for ‘fm’ and yellow for ‘phono’ 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 – first and last – is not so-called knowledge
of so-called facts, but vision – 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 –
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 “suggestions”
for innumerable do-it-yourselves.Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
of complementaries, whether complete or “split”, 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 “has color” or not is as hard to define verbally as are
such questions as “what is music” or “what 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 Rams’s 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,” 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
A Book by Josef AlbersBetter 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.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours
A 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
A 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
A 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 “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s 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.
The Evolution of Useful Things
Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, ingenuity.
Spike and spon
Using an older, pointed knife and spoon, a "spike and spon," to keep the fingers from touching food may have given us the phrase "spic and span" to connote a high standard of cleanliness.
Shaped and reshaped
[Inventions] do not spring fully formed from the mind of some maker, but, rather, become shaped and reshaped through the (principally negative) experiences of their users within the social, cultural, and technological contexts in which they are embedded.
Form follows failure
Imagining how the form of things as seemingly simple as eating utensils might have evolved demonstrates the inadequacy of a "form follows function" argument to serve as a guiding principle for understanding how artifacts have come to look the way they do. Reflecting on how the form of the knife and fork has developed, let alone how vastly divergent are the ways in which Eastern and Western cultures have solved the identical design problem of conveying food to mouth, really demolishes any overly deterministic argument, for clearly there is no unique solution to the elementary problem of eating.
What form does follow is the real and perceived failure of things as they are used to do what they are supposed to do. Clever people in the past, whom today we might call inventors, designers, or engineers, observed the failure of existing things to function as well as might be imagined. By focusing on the shortcomings of things, innovators altered those items to remove the imperfections, thus producing new, improved objects. Different innovators in different places, starting with rudimentary solutions to the same basic problem, focused on different faults at different times, and so we have inherited culture-specific artifacts that are daily reminders that even so primitive a function as eating imposes no single form on the implements used to effect it.
Their wrongness is somehow more immediate
In general, a successful design, which Alexander terms a good fit between form and context, can be declared only when we can detect no more [points that conform to the standard against which we judge]. It is "departures from the norm which stand out in our minds, rather than the norm itself. Their wrongness is somehow more immediate than the rightness."
A small corner of the world of things
It need not be only the likes of engineers, politicians, and entrepreneurs who have a hand in shaping the world and its things, for we are all specialists in at least a small corner of the world of things.
My job is simply to design gadgets that I like
Inventors are people who not only curse, but who also start to think of what can be done to eliminate the bother...When I see something that I don't like, I try to invent a way around it. My job is simply to design gadgets that I like.
More easily asked than definitively answered
Some design questions are more easily asked than definitively answered. Inventors are seldom at a loss for problems, and so they must choose which ones they will work on.
Only a commercial and utilitarian view
By World War II, we seem to have come to take new gadgets for granted or relied upon advertising to inform us of what was new. Whereas our great-grandparents apparently found the latest improvement on the fountain pen or the bicycle of intellectual interest, most people in our generation take only a commercial and utilitarian view of such things.
Stick like hell
When the Wizard of Menlo Park called invention 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, he was speaking not only about the creative act of inventing but also about the whole inventive process needed to bring more than intellectual success. Edison warned against discouragement during the perspiration phase in the following way, reminding us that we get things to work by the successive removal of bugs:
Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! Any other bright-minded fellow can accomplish just as much of he will stick like hell and remember nothing that's any good works by itself. You've got to make the damn thing work!...I failed my way to success.
This tactile form of doodling
Paper clips have also served as objects of more inwardly directed aggression by providing something for the fingers to twist grotesquely out of shape during phone calls, interviews, and meetings. This tactile form of doodling may consume only a fraction of the twenty billion paper clips produced each year, but it underscores the almost limitless functions to which a single form can lead.
Materials and how to employ them
Forming a paper clip presents a common dilemma encountered by engineers and inventors: the very properties of the material that make it possible to be shaped into a useful object also limit its use. If one were to try and make a paper clip out of wire that stayed bent too easily, it would have little spring and not hold papers very tightly. On the other hand, if one were to use wire that did not stay bent, then the clip could not even be formed. Thus, understanding the fundamental behavior of materials and how to employ them to advantage is often a principle reason that something as seemingly simple as a paper clip cannot be developed sooner than it is.
Sonorisms VI
A small corner of the world of things
This tactile form of doodling
The crowded past of reality
Infundibular cores
Whose form our hands have often grown to gloveThe need to dispense a product properly
Difficulties in getting Scotch tape off the roll, for example, prompted the development of a dispenser with a built-in serrated edge to cut off a piece squarely and leave a neat edge handy for the next use. (This provides an excellent example of how the need to dispense a product properly and conveniently can give rise to a highly specialized infrastructure.)
Intrapreneurship
The characteristic of 3M that enabled it to attain such diversity in its product line is a policy of what has generally come to be called "intrapreneurship". The basic idea is to allow employees of large corporations to behave within the company as they would as individual entrepreneurs in the outside world.
...It is 3M's policy (and that of other enlightened companies) to allow its engineers to spend a certain percentage of their work time on projects of their own choosing, a practice known as "bootlegging".
Customers will confer a favor on us
A leaflet printed in March, 1906, tacitly confessed to many difficulties. The instructions for applying the fastener were wordy and complicated. The sponsors of C-curity betrayed their own lack of security by stating: "Customers will confer a favor on us by reporting any difficulty in applying fastener, in which case we will send more detailed instructions." The "instructions for using" were not merely wordy but worried.
The inventive process was often a nonverbal one
Through the ages, the professional users of tools by and large have not needed to, been able to, or wanted to talk to outsiders about their implements. They did not need to because tools themselves are used to make other tools, and thus users could very often fashion a new tool with their old ones. If they did need to communicate the design for a new tool to someone outside their trade, they could do so without having to reveal the tool's intended use...Besides, the inventive process of conceiving a new tool was often a nonverbal one. Finally, craftsmen were unwilling to share information about their specialized tools because to do so would have been to give up their competitive edge and their value to those outside the craft.
The reflective craftsman
Specialized tools like bench shears have proliferated throughout history in part because craftsmen necessarily do the same task with the same tool over and over. After a while, the task becomes routine, and the craftsman is able to perform it with predictable skill. The most creative of artisans is frequently one who, in the midst of routine, pays attention to the details of the work and the tools that effect that work, and so it is that the reflective craftsman develops ideas for new and improved tools in the course of working with those that he perceives to limit his achievement or efficiency.
Form eschews function
Many of the most contemporary silverware patterns appear to be designed more for how the pieces look than for how they work...There is a kind of design that can ignore function entirely. We might say that this is a "form eschews function" school of design, and one that places considerations of aesthetics, novelty, and style above everything else.
But to design from the handle is to shoot from the hip when it comes to silverware, for the business end of the individual pieces is where the action is going to be. Though Emily Post may not have perceived that tradition emerges out of the minimization of failure, there is no excuse for a designer to overlook the fact. Yet this is exactly what modern product designers seem to do when they strive so hard for a striking new look that they throw out function with tradition.
Style consists in distinction of form
Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that "style consists in distinction of form," and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had "become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs," and he found it "necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand."
Such an unholy alliance
Something was wrong, according to Raymond Loewy, who admitted that, "with few exceptions, the [competitors'] products were good." He was "disappointed and amazed at their poor physical appearance, their clumsiness, and...their design vulgarity." He found "quality and ugliness combined," and wondered about "such an unholy alliance."
...Loewy was also "shocked by the fact that most preeminent engineers, executive geniuses, and financial titans seemed to live in an aesthetic vacuum," and he believed that he could "add something to the field." But, not surprisingly, the people he approached were "rough, antagonistic, often resentful."
Most advanced yet acceptable
There is an apparent reluctance among consumers to accept designs that are too radically different from what they claim to supersede, for when, for when familiar things are redesigned too dramatically the function they perform can be less than obvious and thus possibly suspect. Loewy summarized the phenomenon by using the acronym MAYA, standing for "most advanced yet acceptable."
Combinations and arrangements
Everything designed has an element of arbitrariness in its form. Loewy described how groups of his designers used to go about designing a new model automobile. Different groups were given different tasks, such as the front and rear of the car, and the conceptual work began, to be cut off at some predetermined time by deadlines that were imposed at the outset. After a time, there were "piles of rough sketches," and Loewy saw the design proceed as follows:
Now the important process of elimination begins. From the roughs, I select the designs that indicate germinal direction. Those that show the greatest promise are studied in detail, and these in turn are used in combination or arrangements with one another. A promising front treatment can be tried in combination with a likely side elevation sketch, etc. From this a new set of designs emerges. These are then sketched in detail. After careful analysis, they boil down to four or five.
Economy of material and labor
Whatever the comparative merits of [various bed framing methods], what is clear from Aristotle's Mechanica is that economy of material, and labor, was as much an issue in ancient times as it is now.
More profitable and a better buy
The bottom line is certainly of concern, both to those seeking profit and to those seeking value, but neither of these can be measured solely by the amount of dollars spent on production or product. The nonquantitative word "quality" conveys countless ways in which a more expensive thing might be more profitable and yet a better buy as well. The advantages of thicker metal in an automobile body can clearly be argued from various points of view, including resistance to denting and even simple snob appeal. Whereas the manufacturer can use these as selling points and also as justification for a higher price tag, the buyer can easily justify spending more for a car that will keep its appearance longer and provide a status symbol.
Substance over style
By the 1930s, the teardrop shape, known since the turn of the century to be the form of least resistance, was incorporated into Boeing and Douglas aircraft, and, being the contemporary artifact that best symbolized the future, the airplane set the style for things generally. The most static of mundane objects were streamlined for no functional purpose, and chromed and rounded staplers, pencil sharpeners, and toasters were hailed as the epitome of design.
...Though all design is necessarily forward-looking, all design or design changes are not necessarily motivated by fickle style trends. The best in design always prefers substance over style, and the lasting concept over the ephemeral gimmick.
When engineers refuse to leave well enough alone
In a column entitled "March of the Engineers," the humorist and social critic Russell Baker lamented the complexity and sophistication of his office's new telephone system...Baker closed his column by defining the new telephone system as "another bleak example of the horrors created when engineers refuse to leave well enough alone."
In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman wrote that "new telephone systems have proven to be another excellent example of incomprehensible design."
To anticipate all the uses and abuses
Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.
Lighter, thinner, cheaper
The evolution of form begins with the perception of failure, but it is propagated through the language of comparatives. "Lighter", "thinner," and "cheaper" are comparative assertions of improvement, and the possibility of attaching such claims to a new product directly influences the evolution of its form. Competition is by its very nature a struggle for superiority, and thus superlative claims of "lightest," "thinnest," "cheapest" often become the ultimate goals. But the goals more often than not are incompatible. Thus, the lightest and thinnest crystal can be expected also to be the most expensive. But limits on the form of artifacts are also defined by failure, for too light and too thin a piece of crystal might hardly be usable.