Seeing color differently
Kevin Jones was stuck in an all day meeting, twittering on his iphone. I tweeted back that he should be playing iphone games. Long story short, I suggested one of my favorites for boring meetings and classes, Trism. He tweeted back, what about something not about color?
I forgot. He doesn’t see color the same as I do. And I realized all the games I like to play are based on color. What does this really mean? I went over to Vischeck, a tool that enables me to see things like he does.
Kevin, as you would say— I cry.
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It is interesting how we take seeing color for granted. Over the last 2 years I have had some medical problems which changed the way I perceive color from time to time (I call it a red aura). It is not as extreme as Kevin’s, but it was enough to really bug me when I watched TV or looked at pictures. Even designing on the web was not the same.
I once had a student who asked me not to use blue markers because he was not able to read what I had written on the board if it was in blue (he told me it tended to blur into the background; while he could see I had written something, it was like reading a poorly photocopied page). As a result, I now ask students at the beginning of a course to let me know (on a information sheet they fill out) if anyone has difficulty with me using a marker of a certain color. I try, whenever possible, to use black markers for that reason.
Christine, thanks for the link to Vischeck. It makes it easy to check a design and help clients understand that color alone isn’t a reliable way to deliver a message.
@Virginia Yonkers: Blue being blurry is interesting, I think of blue on white as being on the easy to read side. Which it is for me, and the point of this whole thing. What works for me is far from what works for all. I certainly try to use white backgrounds and black type for most text on the web.
I have noticed as I get older that each eye sees color differently. One sees things bluer and the other sees things redder. Trying to determine which one is more accurate made me crazy for a while, now I’m just hoping it evens out. Hope the red aura calms down, that would bug me also.
@Cathy Moore: I still find it shocking to run images through Vischeck. If I could have a superpower for a moment, I would like to be able to see through other peoples eyes. I suspect there is more variation than we realize, we just each think our way is normal.
I almost cried when you said that you would cry. I knew my color blindness was bad, but is it really that bad? Am I really missing that much? The two pictures look IDENTICAL to me. Thankfully, I have bionic proprioception.
@Kevin Jones: There are six distinct colors in the triangles on the left. Two with shades on the right. While I have known that you see differently, there is nothing quite like having you not be able to see something I take so for granted on a daily basis that really gets me. As an artist color is hugely important to me, gives me so much joy.
Now I also see my logo colors are out of the range you can see, so you see everything on my sites as yucky yellow brown. Isn’t that eye opening? So often people comment on the colors when I hand someone a business card. Yet 5 – 10% of people see it as mud. Wow!
The thing is, I don’t attach characteristics or feelings to color as you might. The colors are yellow-brownish, but I wouldn’t call them ‘yucky’. I wouldn’t call them anything – just there. I have never really noticed your colors before – again, they were just what they were but I largely ignore color altogether.
Because I am deficient in the color world, I have almost disassociated color with everything. Yes, it is there, but I don’t make decisions by it or attribute anything to it. For example, on a traffic light, I go when the bottom light lights up and stop when either the middle or top light up – but it is according to position, not color. When I approach a flashing intersection light in the country I never know if it is caution or stop.
Needless to say, my wife dresses me and my classmates in high school could tell when my mom was in the hospital.
@Kevin Jones: Wow, color is emotion to me. And I think for many people– so many of our sayings are around things like ‘feeling blue’ or ‘seeing red’.
I have noticed when people say they are colorblind doing VisualsSpeak that their descriptions tend to be content descriptive rather than more metaphoric. The images they select also tend to be more blue and earth toned (probably because they can see it?).
Now I’m thinking about the implications for how we select images and such for presentations. As Cathy said, we may not be able to rely so heavily on color. If we truly want a particular point to be accessible to most people. Its another factor for being inclusive.
I was driving down the highway yesterday in the gray gloom nearing sunset and I realized you can’t see the bright red of the taillights. I realized it would take WAY more focused attention to notice when they get brighter without the bright color as a cue. Simple everyday thing that you experience so differently.
Christine, I looked at the video you had posted in which you were going through the pictures. What I notices was the use of lines, shapes, and what “images” stood for. Granted, color is one aspect. However, just like some people can hear harmonies as separate (my daughter and I can) others hear it blurred (my son cannot pick out separate harmonies). I think what is important in the work that you do is you start conversations based on differences in perception. Now you have one more tool in your tool set as each of us, either because of genetic make up, experience, or training, have different ways to perceive the world.
I know from my cross cultural training, that it is difficult to get people to recognize that they may perceive things differently than others, and how others perceive those things. This is a great tool to use. Perhaps you can include some of the modified images used for colorblindness, along with images that might look different to a person who is color blind.
@Virginia Yonkers:
We’ve been trying to articulate just what it is we do for years. So it was helpful to get your take on it. We get too focused on the photographs, rather than what we are asking the photos to show us (difference in perception). It is really hard to understand how our own perceptions are constructed, since they just seem normal to us.
I love the idea of having the images where they look different and reflect color vision. It so easy to forget how many people aren’t seeing all the nuances that I am. It has huge impact in the daily life of those who don’t have the same ability. My husband was telling me about how the parts for his electronics are marked with color bands. His colleagues with color challenges have to test the parts to know what they are. It adds a huge amount of time rather than a simple glance at the color banding.
This is a fascinating exchange; I’m grateful both to Christine and to Kevin. As Cathy’s comment suggests, often what trips us up is not what we don’t know, but the things we know that aren’t true — meaning, our presumptions.
Molson’s in Canada, some years back, produced a commercial that was a smash hit. To me (Canadian-born, grew up in the U.S.) possibly the best line was the speaker shouting “and it IS pronounced ‘ZED’ — not ‘zee,’ ‘ZED!’”
@Dave Ferguson:
I continuously learn just how many presumptions I have! And uncover more levels of learning about them on a daily basis. I keep thinking about this color thing, and thinking about the implications. It is not the first time I have thought about it, far from it. But it got personal this time through the lens of an iphone game.
The video is fun. My cultural heritage is French Canadian. I didn’t really understand the implications of that until I heard a college from Quebec talk about what it meant to be French Canadian. Suddenly I got where some of my discomfort with American Cultural Values comes from.