Readymag Design Almanac: Color

When I work on a project, the color decision usually comes to me at an intuitive level quite early. For example, if I’m doing a customer’s project, the color decision takes shape when — or even before — we exchange references and moodboards.

I could say that each large work I undertake sums up a specific period in my life. It has distinct boundaries or at least a distinct inception. It is a kind of movie that incorporates everything that I see, hear, smell, think, all my life circumstances, including my interaction with the materials provided, the client, the references, the cultural context, etc. It’s a synesthetic experience: I perceive color as a felt characteristic of all this — along with the smells, speech, everything else. Thus color is essentially part of the overall spirit of the project.

My choice of colors is rarely made cerebrally. That happens only if the client has his own specific color preferences.

Sometimes it’s important to me that the color hex code should resemble a beautiful word, one that doesn’t contain letters and numbers I don’t like. I don’t like number 2, number 5, and letter b, yet I love number 1, number 7, letter c and letter e. Thus I’m likely to replace #15b2a6 with #17c0a7.

I long believed that a beautiful color or color combination has the nature of what Immanuel Kant called Allgemeines Wohlgefallen (something generally accepted). I believed that the beauty of color was inherent and that the ability to sense it was inborn, akin to an ear for music. I believed that people’s tastes in colors were alike.

And then I suddenly realized that people who seem to be sane in all other ways had absolutely wild and crazy tastes in colors. For example, I sincerely hate brilliant blue that has become so popular in recent years, all of its shades, from International Klein Blue to #0000ff.

I don’t understand how people love it and use it, even how anyone can touch it without nausea and pain. Blue blood oozing from eyes! Blue is bad (in Russian, the word ‘blue’ also suggests alcohol and alcohol abuse)! But adult, reasonable and sane people declare this as their favorite color and use it a lot in their work — and other people look at these blue pictures with unguarded eyes and praise them. How can this be? What’s wrong with me?

So I stopped relying on my personal color perceptions and started relying more on the socially acceptable. Take most popular color sets, from the Adobe Color site, for one.

There’s nothing special about them, but they are OK. You can adjust each set of colors to your wishes, but even that’s not necessary.

To help my students better understand color, I sometimes ask them to write an essay on why they love a certain color or color combination. I believe the ability to express aesthetic impressions in words is very important; doing so, you come to articulate the cultural and semantic echoes you find in an artist’s work and become conscious of your synesthetic experience. Or I send my students on a walk with certain specific tasks: for example, they have to look for a specific color and follow its path in such a way that every step of its path comes to constitute a coherent story.

Over the years the colors I use in my work got more intense and more varied. When I started out, my color palette was black and white and red. Then I added two other primary colors — yellow and blue, which come from the Dutch movement De Stijl.

But I wanted to explore color. So later I moved away from this pure primary-colors approach. I began taking my own decisions to introduce new colors — lilac, purple and many others.

My use of color is intuitive and very subjective. It comes from the subject matter, like trees, color of houses, everything around me. My color comes from printed ink, which I mix with other special colors and a thinning medium. The colors are sometime mixed on the printing blocks directly with rollers and sometimes a palette knife. The inks are applied with careful rolling to again mix the colors on the printing blocks.

I was brought up with Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square. He did lots of color studies himself, and he’s really worth studying. I think looking at paintings and prints is very beneficial for a young designer. So my advice is to study the colors in the works of your favorite painters and think why is it like this, explore how the color is used and try to draw inspiration from it.

One of my favorite artists — Claude Monet — is a renowned colorist. The colors Monet used are very light and delicate. They are not dense. I love his paintings of gardens and particularly I love the purplish-lilac in his waterlily paintings. My personal favorite color is lilac, sort of a pale indigo.

Another painter whose works I admire is David Hockney: he also was a very strong colorist. He’s very different from Monet. Hockney’s colors are very vibrant and dense.

Today we see too much color on the screen, so at some point of time you get used to it. The movies I prefer are black and white — to me they look much more impressive, interesting and dramatic. That sets your own imagination to work. The films I have in mind are The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene, and The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed. I mention these two films because of the tension created by black and white with all shades between, to highlight the dramatic effect it brings to the visual power of the story on the screen.

I try to make the colors I use in my works speak for themselves and add to the meaning of the graphics. This work has many reasons for the colors being what they are. Hampstead Village is an area in London where very many painters, writers and musicians have lived. The streets here are very colorful and pretty, with houses colored in blue and pink and yellow. I took inspiration from the place itself — the colors for the letters were chosen based upon the colors of the houses in the streets. The circles in this poster refer to prominent people who lived in the area; each is color-coded to accord with the person it’s dedicated to. Adjacent to Hampstead is Hampstead Heath — a very popular park with lots of big, ancient trees. When I was in Hampstead doing research on the area, I walked through this park and saw how the sun was lighting up the trunks of the trees, making them sort of glow. The lit area was bright yellow, while the back was intensely green. I also used this combination in my work.

This is a quotation from Winston Churchill, a phrase he said when he became prime minister of Great Britain in 1940. It’s on a black paper. I’m trying to express what he said in color: blood — red, toil, tears, and sweat, all these different substances.

I did some illustrations for greeting postage stamps — one says, “Want to Say Thank You,” and the other says, “Best Wishes.” The “Want to Say Thank You” is basically red and yellow because these are very friendly colors. The “Best Wishes” card I colored blue, lilac and purple, so there was a kind of contrast. In October 2006 they were issued by the Royal Mail

Often people take for granted their perceptions of color and their favorite colors. Most of our clients start out by voicing the stereotypical color preferences expected by society (“a real man wants to live in a black-brown loft,” for one).

So our first task is to bring to light the client’s real preferences. This job takes much, sometimes tedious, persistence: with my partner Anna Smirnova we hold a series of interviews, aiming to learn about the most beautiful and satisfying places that the client has experienced, his favorite movies, his most vivid experiences. We analyze this information to come up with a large number of sample color combinations, perhaps collages of fabrics and room-finishing materials based on his favorite movies. Step by step, we get acquainted with the client and come to understand the mosaic of his or her color portrait. It may be that one client loves woods and parks, large masses of soft shades of green with bits of red, while another may be an enthusiast of classic art who responds to sophisticated, carefully combined color harmonies.

A client once asked us to do the interior of an apartment he had rented. He told us about his deep interest in Eastern religions and philosophy and asked for a restrained, monochromatic interior. After talking with him, we learned that he had lived for many years in France and that he loves delicate, counterintuitive color combinations — lemon-yellow with grey, pink with pale soft blue — not every man is eager to admit such preferences.

The client moved into the flat we had decorated for him and, six months later, bought it. Not long after he married and became a father. I can’t say that all that happened was thanks to our work with color, but an interior based on the real color preferences of the owner is undoubtedly very helpful in nurturing personal harmony.

Colors are like musical notes — there are only three basic colors, but the number of combinations is infinite. I’m not a snob, but I believe that if you want to understand color (as a professional), you need to take classes in painting for a couple of years, no matter your level. Books, articles and experts can never reveal the significance of colors. This understanding is sensational rather than rational; it comes by way of inner experience.

In working with clients, I usually use either vividly bright pure colors or delicate combinations of pastels. This certainly falls within the range of modern Russian interior style, which is still developing but already has some typical features: Russians are conservative but love color and light. Modern Russian interior style incorporates a sophisticated range of natural or close to natural colors in combination with elements made of natural materials. All-white interiors don’t look to advantage in Russia. Such are best in bright regions where the sea is near and nature produces intense colors. Russia is not that sort of place. When everything outside is colored in infinite shades of grey, white interiors inevitably go grey as well.

Julian Suetin

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Julian Suetin is an interior designer and creative director at BBDO Contrapunto (Russia). A graduate of the Stroganov Art Academy, Julian Suetin has worked as an art director for some of the world’s largest advertising agencies (Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Grey Global) and has won more than 20 international awards over the past 15 years. During all this time, he has practiced interior design as a sideline. In 2010, together with partner Anna Smirnova, he opened Vesna-Leto, an interior design business, and began working with private clients.

Oleg Paschenko