Colour as information: some thoughts
stuart August 12th, 2008
Otto Neurath’s dream was that his ISOTYPES might be understood by all peoples. Some information design might border on being universal. Taps (or faucets if you’re in the U.S) derive their colour information from nature: red from fire for ‘hot’, blue from water for ‘cold’. Easy. But what about traffic lights? Maybe the red comes from nature: red stands out in a mostly blueish/greenish landscape and we can associate red with some dangerous creatures or the appearance of blood. But whence the green? Don’t taps’ colours establish that blue is the conceptual opposite of red? Perhaps green is used for go because it is the ‘afterimage’ of red: the visual opposite? But then, what about the colour information contained in the software application, Word? Red denotes a spelling error, i.e ‘stop, and correct this’. But does green mean OK to proceed? Of course not. In Word green denotes poor grammar. Is this poor information design? Or does it merely show that we do need to learn to ‘read’ information design as Ellen Lupton or Tomas Maldonado would tell us? Certainly it would limit graphic communication if red only ever meant danger or stop. What are your thoughts?
August 17th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Red does seem to have captured the danger market.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Yes it does, but yellow works well too, especially in combination with black, in stripes. What I’m trying to get at is how red can mean stop or danger but also fine to eat (a red tomato ironically, as opposed to a green one, which would tell most of us to ’stop’). Also sports cars should be red, should they not? And in that regard red has been described as a fast colour.
October 8th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Don’t ya find when doing some graphic design that sometimes you hesitate to use red for that reason – it might steal away too much attention or be associated with caution or error messages.
There was this nice AIGA article, I came across awhlie back. Red and yellow for fast food and danger. Nice symmetry that.
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/red-and-yellow-kills-a-fellow
December 10th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
The problem of course is that colour meaning is inherently subjective. While we have social conventions for how we use colour - taps/traffic lights are somewhat universal - these don’t always translate across.
I think context is a key component for interpreting/using colour - we understand colour in particular settings - as Stu was saying about how red can mean different things in different settings.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:32 pm
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