Hyperquake Blog

Anyone who’s been through art or design school has probably had to sit through a color theory class or two. There truly is a lot of interesting science behind the way particular colors and combination of tones behave optically: how you can fake three-dimensionality by splitting color channels and wearing blue- and red-lensed glasses, how two squares of the same grey can look totally different surrounded by contrasting fields of color, OMG and don’t even get me started on synesthesia. No argument that all that stuff is really fascinating.

What I’ve never been a huge fan of are things like color forecasting, or testing 41 shades of blue to see which “performs better”. I tend to fall more in the camp described by Stephen Drucker (editor of House Beautiful Magazine) who, in a recent Huffington Post article, compared color to sex.

“Color is like sex. It’s mysterious. It’s unknowable. It never looks the same twice. No two people see the same thing. No two people feel the same thing. I once went to China on a cruise ship. Eight hundred of us got off the ship wearing white, because it feels festive and shippy and says “I’m on a cruise.” In China white is the color of mourning. We
looked insane.”