For this reading response, you are to draw upon the readings on color (specifically the Lupton & Phillips “Color” Chapter, Boyle’s Color Harmony for the Web, and Horton’s “Color in Icons” chapter) and define three terms specific to color theory, analysis, and/or application that you did not previously know before completing the reading. Before you post, please check to see if someone has already defined the term in their post. You should only define terms that haven’t already been explained by one of your peers’ in their post, or terms that you think could be further explained. Make sure that you cite your sources of information (even your peers, if you are building upon their definitions).
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ENG 350: Visible Rhetoric (Fall 2010) 
According to Boyle, RGB is a term used specifically for web design as the “images on the color video monitor are created by the use of three phosphors, red, green, and blue which are activated by an electronic beam.” (19) I was familiar with the code, but did not understand what it meant, namely that it indicates the values of red, green, and blue in a particular color. Furthermore, “most monitors can only display 256 colors at once” and that number goes down to 216, “dubbed the Browser-Safe Pallette” when consideration is given to what colors are common to Macintosh and Windows operating systems. When designing websites it is critical to factor in the Browser-Safe Pallete as it is the only means by which you can have any control over how your work is delivered and viewed. Going outside these constraints can have significantly adverse effects on your work.
Tint is a term that comes from an examination of the color wheel and is discussed both by Boyle (15) and Lupton/Phillips (74). Quite simply, tint is the lighter version of a color. In other words, if someone is asking you to adjust the tint, you will want to clarify that they are talking about how light they want the color and know that to lighten the color you will need to add white.
1. Analogous Colors – I have not studied the color wheel since junior high; therefore, I forgot all the different terms that refer to different areas on this illustrative map. According to Lupton and Phillips, analogous colors “are color schemes built from hues that sit near each other on the color wheel.” (73) The color difference is not substantial because these colors have a similar color temperature. I guess I could have inferred the meaning of this term by just studying the word “analogous” which means to be similar. After reading this chapter, I feel that I have more knowledge about color. The color wheel is a great tool to explain the relationships between colors. The analogous color section is just one part, but it is an important part.
2. Demographic Palette – According to Boyle’s article, the demographic color palette relates to how “different audiences respond differently to particular colors.” (6) I was always aware of this notion, but I was never aware that it had a name. I notice that younger children respond to primary colors. The children’s section in any soft lines department at stores like Target confirms this. The bright colors seem to symbolize their innocence, happy attitude, and whimsical temperament. The article also says that today’s preteens aspire to wear clothes with more sophisticated (darker) colors because they want to emulate the age group above them. I could not agree more. The same thing happened when I was in junior high. I noticed a drastic change in my friends’ wardrobes. The dark colors seem to symbolize how the preteens want to be treated like adults while making a drastic change in their appearance. It is amazing how colors can be utilized as a tool that can covey someone’s level of maturity.
3. Saturation – According to Lupton and Phillips, saturation is “the relative purity of the color as it neutralizes to gray.” (74) At first, I did not understand this definition because I was not familiar with this concept, and I wish the textbook had a more elaborate answer. I believe that saturation could be described as when the hue of the color fades, becomes duller, and is not recognizable in its original form because it is no longer fully saturated. A color becomes less saturated when there is more gray. If the color does not have any gray, the color will be fully saturated and bright.
I have to admit that most of these terms I have thought to be synonymous up until last week (particularly hue, shade, and tint). I chose the terms I am going to define because I got the sense from the Lupton and Phillips text that these elements are somehow essential to the question of color. I am not going to cite the definitions directly from the text because I believe it will help me to understand these concepts if I have to rework their definitions. For citation purposes, though, know that I am relying on pages 74-75 in /Graphic Design: The New Basics/ for my analysis. Outside of the assigned reading, I did seek help in understanding these concepts from Photoshop’s Color Lab* actually, which allows you to see the hue (H), saturation (S) and value (B). Looking at this helped put a visual the verbal definitions I am working with. My understanding and description of the relationships I am talking about here, while some are alluded to by Lupton and Phillips, are largely the result of me “playing around” with the Color Lab, creating different colors by changing the hue, brightness, and saturation.
Hue: The elements of the color wheel, or the category into which a color fits on the color wheel. Various shades or tines of red, are still categorized as the red hue. In less precise language, it is hues that are perhaps what many people think of when they think of color (i.e. yellow, red, blue, green, etc.).
Value: Where the color in question lies on a scale of lightness-darkness is the color’s value. A color with a high value will appear white (or better yet gray) whereas a color with a low value will appear black. Because value is independent of hue, reducing an image to black and white will still result in contrasting brightness where different hues once were.
Saturation: The scale of the sort of colorfulness of a color as it fades to gray. The relative saturation point of a color is dependent on its brightness (intensity), if I understand these relationships correctly. I believe that the saturation scale is such that the most saturated and most desaturated color in an image reduced to black and white would appear as the same color.
*I did not myself think to look to Color Lab for help understanding the books topics. An old friend of mine studying to be a graphic designer recommended this course of action after I expressed frustration regarding trying to understand the relationship these terms have with one another.
Something weired happed with my computer cause it says I posted at 7:25 when I actually posted at 2:25 am. In any case, since we now have “saturation” defined twice and mine is the last in the line to define it, I thought I would just go ahead and add another definition to try to make up for the repeat.
Shade: A color created by adding black to a hue. Shade can be understood as being in contrast with tint (defined in another post) and results in darker versions of a hue. This meaning is reflected in the terms non-precise language in so far was we will say things like “the sign was a darker red” or “that shade of red is really pretty on you.”
The first term I didn’t know before the reading was tertiary color. I was familiar with primary and secondary but not tertiary. According to Boyle, tertiary colors are the result of blending a primary color with a secondary color.
Lupton and Phillips discuss optical color mixing. This is when flecks of color make up an image. Up close the dots are seen and the image is lost or unclear. When viewed from far away, the dots blend optically and the image is clear. When we were discussing this in class I was looking at the image of the woman’s eye in our book. In my book, it was just a rectangle filled with blots of color. I looked across the room and another student has his book open to the same page. Looking at his book, the image looked like a woman’s eye and I could no longer make out the dots. It’s similar to the effect you get if you look very closely or use a magnifying glass to look at pictures in a newspaper. It also makes me a bit dizzy.
The final term is also from Lupton and Phillips. I think of color palette as what an artist puts paint on before putting it on the brush, the kidney shaped thing with a hole for the thumb. However, for purposes of this class, color palette is a group of color placed together and implemented in a design for desired effect. Different color palettes can be applied to the same pattern and each one will emphasize and/or minimize various aspects of the design.
Boyle talks about the “psychology of color,” and how every color is perceived in a different way. Most times, we cannot explain how color affects us, yet it is crucial for a designer to understand that color must be used carefully. For instance, the color red is thought to be the most fascinating of all colors; it can signify danger, raise blood pressure, and have a sexual quality, due to physical stimulation associated with this color. Blue, the opposite of red, is typically associated with tranquility. Many of us think of blue in relation to water and the sky, and we associate it with reliability. This makes me think of the phrase, “a true, blue friend.” Yellow inspires cheerfulness, and is representative of the sun for many cultures. Due to its high visibility, yellow is an attention-grabbing color (23-4). These are just a few examples of how our minds and cultures process the meaning of color, and makes one realize that using an inappropriate color to market a product could result in disaster.
Visited Links are one of three types of text colors on the web (17). Each text color need to work independently of the others to be effective for the end user. While the term is self-explanatory, I have never thought of it as being a type of text color, or given any thought to how much I appreciate knowing which sites I have already visited. When doing research, I quickly depart sites that hold no interest or value for me, and not until I have viewed numerous links do I realize that I could not possibly recall which ones have been seen or unseen. Once I see the darker color of the previously-viewed link, I am reminded that I’ve been there and done that.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) is the model used for offset printing in full-color documents. While I have purchased many color printer cartridges, it has never occurred to me how these colors work together to offer a wide variety of color to the user. CMYK works by subtractive, reflective color. Reflective color is not absorbed by substances like ink and paint. According to the subtractive color model, pigmentation (coloring matter) and CMYK work like color does in nature. For instance, when sunlight is projected onto an object, the object absorbs or removes some of that light, and the remaining reflected light is the color we see. Boyle uses the example of a tulip being bright red because it has absorbed all non-red from the light spectrum (21).
The first term that Lupton and Philips taught me is Graduated Color Wheel. I have always know that shades to go from dark to light but never knew the technical term for it. I had also never realized that the point of greatest saturation can be at different places depending on the color. The authors describe that yellow has the most intensity toward the lighter end of the wheel, while blue is more intense in the darker zone.
The second term is also from Lupton and Philips and that is “additive.”This is when visbile light, red, green, and blue, create all the hues in one spectrum.
The final term I learned was “subtractive.” This is the term used for pigment-based color systems because as more colors are mixed, less light is reflected. The books says that CMYK is a subtractive system. Nonstandard colors are used because light reflected off cyan and magenta pigments mixes more purely into new hues than light relected off of blue and red pigments.
I know it said to not define terms already posted by classmates, but while I am going to repeat some, I do so because the definitions in Graphic Design The New Basics by Lupton and Phillips helped me to understand concepts I have been introduced to in prior courses but did not grasp until now. For some reason, I had always had tint and shade confused in my mind. I suppose I always associated tint with tinted windows and how they are dark and always assumed that a tint was a darker shade of that color. As you can see with the improper use of the word “shade” in my previous defintion of tint, I had always thought that shade just refered to any variation of a color, either lighter or darker. Having taken both Visual Rhetoric and Hypertext which dealt with these concepts, I am embarrassed to say I didn’t know the difference.
Other definitions that are embarrassingly new to me are RGB and CMYK. I knew what they stood for, but was ignorant that RGB was for screen and CMYK was for print. Having designed several websites I cannot believe I didn’t know this. Further, I had no idea that RGB at full strength created white. How could a combination of colors create white? This new knowledge had given me much greater insight to both print and web design, which hopefully will help me in future assignments.
Selective Emphasis:
In Lupton’s and Phillips’ chapter on color in Graphic Design the New Basics, a section I found very interesting was on pages 80 and 81. The discussion of how choosing colors in a pattern create selective emphasis was particularly interesting to me because it makes me think of the ways we choose colors in fashion, specifically in what we wear. Lupton and Phillips refer to studies that “use typographic pattern to explore how color alters not just the mood of a pattern, but the way its shapes and figures are perceived.” These studies combine all of what we’ve learned previously in the chapter on colors and how they work together. This makes me think of fashion because patterns and color combinations are used in our clothing, and it takes a good designer who knows a good deal about color to pick the right colors that “go together” in a way that creates a desired mood by the way the pattern and combination of colors in the pattern relate to one another and bring focus to some parts over others.
Bezold Effect:
Lupton and Phillips also refer to something called the “Bezold Effect,” and I think this relates closely with selective emphasis of colors. The Bezold Effect (on page 78) refers to the ways you can add a darker or lighter color to a group of colors (for example, a woven rug), it can create darker or lighter impact on the eye. This comes back to the discussion of selective emphasis because the decision to add certain colors to a pattern (whether it is a rug, a blanket, or a piece of clothing) can create different moods and perceptions of the pattern.
Complements and near complements:
Complements and near complements relate closely to the aforementioned definitions because colors’ positions on the color wheel play an important role in creating a mood or different perception of a pattern. The color combinations chosen by the designer need to be made carefully, and one process of considering what colors to choose would be to consult the color wheel. Complementary colors are opposite of each other on the color wheel. This means that their colors are very different from each other, creating a rather stark and extreme color combination. Choosing complementary colors to go together in a pattern must be made thoughtfully because the design will definitely stick out, and may be too harsh a combination. I usually associate complementary colors with holidays or sports teams, which are often very obvious and garish. Therefore, complementary colors put together could end up being associated with things that the designer may not want associated with. This is where near complements come in. Near complements are colors that come close to opposite of each other on the color wheel. Especially when it comes to clothing, these colors create a more subdued look that are not as easily associated with holidays and sports teams. Near complements (as well as analogous colors) may make a better choice for a pattern being worn on somebody’s body, but it all depends on what the designer is going for.
What stuck out the most to me was the word “transparent”, which Lupton and Phillips used on page 76. I was confused by the process that printers use involving “transparent ink”. Whenever I think of ink, I think of something highly visible and dark. I am still unsure of how the colors sit transparently on top of one another to create a new color. In my mind, I picture it as similar to an effect one can create in the dark room during photo development. Using an Enlarger, one can place colored filtered behind the lens to shine a different hue on the film strip. This can turn it another color or just give it a warmer effect. I compare the use of these colored filters to what printers do by filtering one color through the lens of another.
The next concept the two authors discuss is “transparent light”. Light itself does not pass through solid objects unless they have a low density. So what do they mean by the light being transparent? The authors talk about the mixture of colors emitted in the form of light to create a combined image. This optical illusion give us the colors we see on screen, as well as in print.
The final term I found interesting was the concept of “neutrals”. Some of us often describe something as being a neutral color, but I have never been given an absolute definition of what qualifies as neutral. In this chapter, I gathered that neutrality happens when “combining colors that are close in value softens the distinction between elements” (Lupton and Phillips, 74). In an entirely different field, having your car in neutral means you are going nowhere (also a saying, which has its own rhetorical applications). The first entry in dictionary.com’s definition of the word “neutral” describes the concept of neutrality in war and politics. This brings up the question: what do we feel when we see neutral colors? Some of us feel sad, while others feel calm and relaxed. The very nature of neutral colors themselves have no right or wrong (no taking sides, as the war metaphor goes). I could go on about the concept of neutrality and how the color associations relate to the rhetoric we use in “neutral” metaphors, but I will probably save it for a possible project.
My definitions are all from Lupton and Phillips’ “Graphic Design, the New Basics.”
1.) The first term I found that I did not previously fully understand is intensity. Ok duh, intensity is obviously the brightness or dullness of a color. But what I didn’t know about it is that apart from adding either black, making it less intense, or white, making it more intense, you can neutralize it by adding gray. This also lowers its saturation.
2.) Which leads me to my second term. Saturation is something I did not know about before this chapter. And to be honest, I could use a little more clarity. I do not feel that Lupton and Phillips make totally clear what saturation of a color is. They define it as the relative purity of a color as it neutralizes to gray. I find myself wondering if they think the color is more pure as it gets closer to gray, or as it becomes more intense as white is added to it. So I looked it up. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary says of saturation, “a chromatic purity : freedom from dilution with white; degree of difference from the gray having the same lightness —used of an object color; (2) : degree of difference from the achromatic light-source color of the same brightness.” Although it may have seemed obvious that chromatic purity brings the shade closer to white, this definition leads me to believe that it actually brings it closer to gray.
3.) Selective emphasis. This is an interesting tool that studies use to determine how different colors affect the mood of the pattern, and the way the pattern is perceived. This is interesting to me because it not only shows how certain colors and patterns work in relation to eachother, but it also gives a little insight into why we perceive things in certain ways.