Why did the track and field track paint blue and purple at the Paris Olympics? Even the colors of badminton, football, and baton have become small and fresh?
Italy track producers say purple is "designed to break records" and allows athletes to perform better.
Is that really the case?
In "Color" by the "Unread · Artist", design theorist Falcinelli shares the story behind color design, restoring how color changes our vision.
Translated by Riccardo · Falcinelli |
Unread · Produced by Artist
01Why do people like to use purple? Of all the colors used in food packaging, purple is a very interesting color. Although it is not bright, does not belong to the three primary colors, and is not the favorite color of most people, its charm is enduring and often used by people. From toffee to elderberry gummies and cranberry juice, purple is used in the packaging of all foods that are easy to digest, such as the famous Mica chocolate, whose purple patterns in different shades emphasize the soothing nature of milk chocolate over dark chocolate. In the food industry, purple has always symbolized slowness and calmness.
If we contrast purple with a striking red, we find that purple is more subtle and formal. Viola is also the name of the violet and the symbolic color of the Christian festival of Lent – a mystical color that symbolizes repentance. In addition, purple is also a ripe color, both in a positive and negative way: sometimes it means wisdom, sometimes it symbolizes death. In United States cartoons, purple is often associated with mature, stern or evil characters, such as Snow White's stepmother. And in "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Little Mermaid", the witch's skin tone even turns purple. In these cases, purple is in some ways a decaying pink, symbolizing a person who used to be glamorous, but is no longer needed.
A well-known example of this association comes from Kandinsky, who analyzed purple physiologically, suggesting that purple was associated with illness and associated it with older women. But this sense of ageing in purple may stem from the great success of Parkin's synthetic mallow in the 19th century, making it one of the most quintessential Victorian colors and ultimately inevitably a symbol of luxury, elitism and snobbery.
Today, we can still see this Victorian heritage on the packaging of the famous Liberty London tea set in United Kingdom, as well as on the packaging of another classic brand, Cadbury chocolate.
02
The feelings that color conveys to us are related to the environment
Generally speaking, the division of warm and cold tones is almost conventional. Blue, cyan, and some purples are cool colors, while green is basically classified as warm because of the presence of yellow. However, there are also some colors that are quite vaguely defined, such as turquoise green, which is difficult to define, and army green. In general, this seems to be an obvious fact, and there is nothing to argue about. However, it's not that simple. For example, when we say that a certain color is warm, what exactly are we talking about? Most of the time, we are using a metaphor or coming up with a synesthetic association that associates a certain color with something that gives us a warm feeling, such as the sun or fire. However, the limitations of this connection are far beyond our imagination.
If we heat a piece of iron, it will first turn orange, but as the temperature increases, it will turn yellow, then white, and finally blue. Therefore, from a physical point of view, blue is hotter than red. Because of this, the cold light on a cloudy day – in photographer's parlance – has a higher "color temperature" than the light at dusk. Therefore, the correlation between color and temperature is actually a very traditional fact. And people's blindness to all kinds of icy orange and boiling blue is the result of a specific society and a specific historical moment. Over the past century, a great deal of effort has been put into proving that the warmth and coldness of colors are an indisputable natural phenomenon, and to verify them through a series of experiments based on the effects of different light waves on human metabolism. One of the classic experiments, which has been cited and repeated many times by Eaton, claimed that when people enter a room that is all painted red, their hearts beat faster and their skin's microcirculatory activity is more active than when they are in a blue room.
It's hard to say whether this experiment is always reliable, depending on the type of red and blue, and mostly on the specific context. In fact, although people's hearts beat faster for a few minutes, it only lasted for a short time, after which the body quickly returned to calm. The reason for the excitement may simply stem from the change in the scene, not the color. However, in similar experiments, we cannot ignore the fact that not only the color red is at work, but the "room" itself is also at work, as it can trigger claustrophobia in people, which in turn affects metabolism. The feelings that color conveys to us have to do with the environment, not with the hue. For example, we feel sick when we see rusty liquid gushing out of the bathroom faucet, even though it has the same wavelength as a beautiful sunset. Therefore, simply asserting that red is an exciting color is an overly broad and unfounded generalization. In fact, when we talk about a certain color, we always make it specific to the color of something.
03
Without contrast, warm and cold tones don't make sense
In fact, behind these studies of the effects of color on the human psyche lies a more general, older, and more intractable question: whether color has a universal, supracultural connotation, or even an innate meaning.
Culture is acquired from the moment we are born, and the brain needs to interact with the things around it in order to grow. Culture is "nature" to the brain. Therefore, in order to interpret complex human cognitive phenomena, it is too arbitrary to make a strict distinction between innate endowment and acquired acquisition.
If we keep a child in absolutely safe conditions from birth – so that he can neither experience pain nor see blood – and expose him only to the red color of industrial objects, then the child is likely to develop a concept of his own about the color red, and that concept will cause him to react completely differently from us when he sees red.
In this sense, the meaning of associating red with blood is always cultural, but at the same time inspired by unavoidable conditions. But, to be precise, it is this association that is inevitable for human beings, not the meaning that arises from it.
In addition, in China, the symbolic color of love is not red, but delicate pastel colors such as pink or sky blue. Therefore, the relationship between the manic sense of mania that Westerners are accustomed to and color saturation does not hold up here.
It follows that in most cases, depending on the context, we can establish various correspondences, which in turn allow colors to have multiple meanings, or even opposite meanings. For example, bright colors can effortlessly connect us to the most cheerful feelings, because people are born phototropic, and when there is plenty of light or good weather, like Lucky Star Chinese Restaurant, things tend to look brighter. But nothing prevents us from doing the opposite, which is to construct a positive meaning with dull or dull colors, as evidenced by the brown and beige colors used in the packaging of organic and natural products. Modern science considers color to be a continuum from red to purple, encompassing all hues, and can be divided: that is, we can take a small piece of it at a time and discuss, use it, or name it. In this space, each color occupies a point and is always close or far from the other points. I'm able to define one red as a "warm hue" because I can contrast it with another red in the spectrum – this red doesn't seem so warm to me because it's farther away from yellow. Without this overall internal contrast, then the cool and warm tones have no meaning, and we can't even associate them.
In fact, in the Middle Ages, people also made a distinction between colors, and although they did not know the concept of the color spectrum, they believed that both red and blue belonged to warm tones because these two colors were bright and striking, while yellow belonged to cool colors because it was similar to the color of metal. However, we cannot pretend that the colorful modern world is fundamentally different from the visual world of human evolution. A red, purple or blue room is also ultimately an industrial experience, and some of the reactions of people may be related to this human behavior rather than the type of hue. In conclusion, red is more exciting and aggressive than blue for many people these days, but we can't explain this phenomenon perfectly, and maybe the time has not yet come. We have become so caught up in artificial colors that we cannot rationally interpret humanity as a whole.
Article source: Unread