Colour

As designers, developers, or anyone who works with the web, colour is integral to our day-to-day work. Let's face it, it's integral to our lives full stop. Yet we rarely give it a second thought, we take it for granted. But how does colour work? It's not as straight forward as you think. You've got your brain and your technology to thank for that.

Transcript

1. COLOUR by Anthony Casey @anthony_casey Colour is integral to our lives. Something we work intimately with every day. Yet we don’t ever think really that about it? We take it for granted. It turns out it’s way more complicated than you think. Speaker Notes
2. RED Let’s start simple. This is Red. But how do I know that your ‘red’ is red? Your red might be green, just you know it as red? We don’t actually know. But there is science. Speaker Notes
3. NOT BRIAN MAY This is Sir Isaac Newton. He was pretty amazing. Totally in tune with the universe. Gravity, calculus, all that stuff. He was also fascinated by colour. Before he came along no one knew really where colour came from. Speaker Notes
4. I tooke a bodkine gh & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it … there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles Isaac Newton Of Colours (~1666) So he did some experimenting. That text is from his 1666 paper ‘Of Colours’. Basically he took a metal stick, jammed it in his eye socket, wiggled it about and noted down what happened. Over and over again. At the height of the bubonic plague. Proper science that. Speaker Notes
5. After all that prodding about he did eventually work out the whole white light through a prism thing, discovering the colour spectrum and working out the basics of where colour came from. No big deal. Speaker Notes
6. Just in case - here’s the spectrum. With ultra violet and infra red out of your perception. (And who knows what else) Speaker Notes
7. So light waves travel from the sun, bounce off things, and travel to the back of your eye. There they meet 120 million rods - not colour, but shapes … it’s basically your night vision. The colour bit comes from 6.5million cones - 64% Red, 32% green, 2% blue - BLUE VERY SENSITIVE That info is then sent to your brain. Speaker Notes
8. 2 4 5 We have three cones that allow us to see the colours we can see. Other animals fare differently. Dogs and monkeys have just two. Swifts apparently have 4 - butterflys 5. That means they can see 2 more colours we can’t even comprehend - never mind the blends of those colours. Speaker Notes
9. 16 But 5 is nothing. This we killer beastie - the Mantis Shrimp - has SIXTEEN cones. He can interpret 13 more base colours than we can. THIRTEEN. More on this fascinating dude at http://theoatmeal.com/ comics/mantis_shrimp Speaker Notes
10. Can you imagine what his rainbows look like? Speaker Notes
11. Despite the proven science, a colour isn’t a colour until it’s passed through our brain. A colour is a human perception of a waveform. That’s when things get … interesting. Speaker Notes
12. WHY IS THE SKY BLUE? So let’s start with a simple question … I’ll answer it later. Speaker Notes
13. “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.” Herman Melville Billy Budd (1924) We like to name colours, but when does Violet become blue? Orange, become red? Speaker Notes
14. XKCD set up a survey to try and make sense of it all. 150,000 people were asked to put names to shades of colour. It actually nailed down a sort of consensus for 954 distinct colours. From purple through to ‘cloudy blue’ - Randall’s blog post about it is here - http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey- results/ Speaker Notes
15. It turns out that our naming of colours is a fundamental part of our brains. As an example until relatively recently the Japanese language had no distinct name for green. ‘Ao’ was used as a term to cover all blue and green. Go traffic lights are referred to as blue, vegetables are “blue- things”, noobs “smell of blue” Speaker Notes
16. It wasn’t until 1917, and the first Crayola crayons were imported to Japan that they needed a distinct word for green. They co-opted word midori which was a wishy sort of word that meant the equivalent of teal. Then US occupation after WWII cemented the word to being green via education system. Excellent full story (and the seed for this talk) http:// www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the- world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our- brains-part-i/ Speaker Notes
17. WINE DARK SEA Is Japanase a weird outlier? Not really. Yes it was very recent, and possibly because green popped up last. All languages and cultures follow a similar sort of pattern. Usually it’s blue that’s last. There is evidence in all sorts of languages. For example, in Homer’s Illiad & Odyssey from 750BC the descriptive term “wine dark sea” appears many times. Blue isn’t mentioned once. Not artistic licence, though, it’s now believed there just wasn’t a word for it in the language at the time. Speaker Notes
18. You can even see it action today. Visualisation of World Colour Survey by Terrence Fradet - http://fathom.info/latest/3317 WCS - 2696 surveyed, covering 110 emerging languages. Participants were asked to categorise 330 different colour tiles. Speaker Notes
19. Greens and blue are nearly always lumped together in very early developing languages. Speaker Notes
20. More distinctions appear as the languages evolve. Speaker Notes
21. WR Y B G B Roughly speaking language starts with distinguishing dark and light. Then usually red pops out first. Evolution plays a roll, and environment. Red is a powerful warning, fire is useful. Yellows and greens are useful for food, knowing when things are ripe, or rotten … blue is a bit weird. There aren’t many useful things that are blue. The sky, really, is only useful when it’s grey - otherwise it’s just kind of there. Speaker Notes
22. So how does this effect colour? Massively it turns out. This is the Himba tribe, who come from Namibia & Angola - They have four colours in their language zuzu = dark colours including reds;
 vapa = light colours and some shades of yellow; buru = is some shades of green; dambu = other shades of green, red and brown Nothing distinct for blue. Speaker Notes
23. Scientists show them this experiment. They ask the participants to choose the different coloured tile. Almost instantly they honed in to the right choice. Speaker Notes
24. Then they were shown this one. And the tribe looked at them like they were idiots. Not because it was easy to spot - but because they couldn’t actually spot the obviously blue tile. Speaker Notes
25. BECAUSE SOMEONE TOLD YOU IT WAS So why is the sky blue? It turns out it’s because someone told you it was. By actually naming a colour, creating that boundary in our brains, that’s what seems to actually makes a colour what it is. I told you it got interesting. Speaker Notes
26. PERCEPTION We’re a closed system. We don’t know what anyone else sees. Colour doesn’t exist. Except in our brains. Our brains control it all, making sense of the chaos, making sure our puny minds don’t explode with information overload. Speaker Notes
27. And, of course, it totally lies to us. YOUR BRAIN LIES TO YOU, TO PROTECT YOU. (A and B here are EXACTLY THE SAME COLOUR) Speaker Notes
28. R G B So that’s your brain. It turns out that recreating colour on monitors is a bloody minefield too. Speaker Notes
29. 216 Web safe colour palette - 216 extremely dull colours. I had to work with this at the start of my career. And I’m not THAT old. This is all you had to choose from - really bad selection looking back. There are some right mingers. Speaker Notes
30. such yellow wow wow best culur That bloody Geocities yellow. Speaker Notes
31. USE ALL THE COLOURS That’s the past though, yeah? Dead was now. Innit? Speaker Notes
32. International Commission on Illumination (CIE) CIE 1931 RGB Well the CIE have worked out a nice graph of all the colours we are supposed to be able to perceive. Speaker Notes
33. Microsoft & HP sRGB And in 1996 MS & HP standardised a colour space of the spectrum for use on screens, printers camera cods etc. It’s not perfect, but covers a good usable chunk of the spectrum. It’s been standard for nearly 20 years. Virtually everything digital you look at uses this as the base. Speaker Notes
34. Adobe Adobe RGB Good old Adobe (and others) wanted to push things further still - they’ve got their wide gamut AobeGRB colour space. BRILLIANT MOR COLORZ!!! Yeah … it’s never that simple. Speaker Notes
35. 0,0,255 0,255,0 255,0,0 WIDE GAMUT (Adobe RGB) 0,0,255 0,255,0 255,0,0 NORMAL GAMUT (sRGB) Alas simply shunting wide gamut into an sRGB world doesn’t really map. Colours just get shunted up a scale and a red becomes a RRREEEDDD - etc etc. Speaker Notes
36. International Colour Consortium ICC v4 As ever, there are people trying to standardise it all. You’ve probably seen the well intentioned ICC standards mentioned on all sorts of things. Speaker Notes
37. You won’t be surprised to hear that adoption and implementation by OS and browser is a complete and utter mess. Take this example off two browsers from the same screen. So next time your weighing up a new monitor. And you’re being seduced by the mention of EXTRA COLOURS … Speaker Notes
38. F*CK IT STICK WITH sRGB
39. sRGB is all good right? Of course not. This old Tom’s Hardware graph show some of the actual colour spaces reproduced by devices - all supposedly sRGB. They’re all over the place. Basically, you can NEVER trust any screen to accurately show ANY colour. Colour is hard. There are no media queries for that. Speaker Notes
40. COLOUR IS SCIENTIFIC FACT The colour spectrum is very real. We can measure it. Using science. Speaker Notes
41. YOUR BRAIN LIES TO YOU Unfortunately, our brains get involved and cock it all up. Speaker Notes
42. TECHNOLOGY IS INCOMPETENT To top it off our technology is also completely incompetent. Speaker Notes
43. NOT WORTH IT So next time your decorating, and arguing with your partner over the colour of the walls, and she accuses YOU of being colour blind … Leave it, it’s not worth it. Speaker Notes
44. NOT WORTH IT The next time you’re agonising over which of the 30 shades of red in front of you best reflect your brand … leave it, it’s not worth it. Speaker Notes
45. GREYSCALE. IT’S THE ONLY WAY
46. THANKS @anthony_casey