More about seeing color differently

My last post Seeing Color Differently inspired by realizing Kevin can’t see my favorite iphone game generated a interesting comment string.

Cathy Moore said “color alone isn’t a reliable way to deliver a message.” That really got me to thinking how often I rely on color to convey a feeling or communicate emotion. Then I realized Kevin, and others with red/green challenges couldn’t see my logo colors. I went back to the Vischeck tool to run some more examples.

And those with blue/yellow challenges see something else entirely.

When I think about my brand, it is the colors I think about. I have a whole wardrobe of clothing in lime green and orange that I wear when I am in ‘business’ mode. I print handout covers on my color. I even have toys in my logo colors to play with during training classes. Lets say I am color identified. I made a comment to Kevin on the last post,

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.

and he comes back with

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.

Wow. This has been a slow seeping in of realization of how totally different my day to day reality is from Kevin’s. I started noticing how driving down the highway at night is not the same for us.

It seems like it would take a lot more effort to discern taillights without the color contrast as a cue. Virgina Yonkers reminds us,

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.

I would say it even goes deeper than that. Even when we intellectually understand the difference, and even see examples, we may not really fully understand until we can put the information into a context that makes sense to us personally. Not being able to play an iphone game, see my logo colors and realizing taillights are red did that for me. My understanding of seeing color differently deepened considerably.

Thanks Kevin for sharing a piece of your reality that I didn’t really fully understand before.

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.