Readymag Design Almanac: Color

Color is a visual experience for the viewer’s eyes and brain. It’s cool to make this experience unique each time. I think the sensation of novelty experienced when you look at certain colors is very important. That’s why new, unhackneyed colors are always very advantageous and why the fashion in color changes so frequently.

Transitional colors resulting from the mixture of basic colors are in fashion now — for example, yellow plus green #E4FF33 and blue plus violet #523BFF. These are shades for which you won’t easily find names in the usual lists.

This year, bleak and subtle colors (earthy #6D8256, vinous #B34F70)

are also in demand — just because they haven’t yet worn out their welcome. I don’t much like such colors, but in combination with classical gold, silver or bright acid colors they can be interesting. There are several basic colors that never die. The absolute leader is black, of course.

Black is always popular, and monochromatic combinations of black, grey and white are now much used both in the fashion industry and in graphic design. The electro blue #003DFF has stayed popular over many years — it has the right energetic vibe.

The natural and fresh yellow #FFEE2E is constantly used because it allows designers to come up with a shade that works for their particular project, conveying the proper emotions, saying the right thing. For the 15 years that I’ve been in the design industry, I have seen many changes in the particular yellow used, but yellow never annoys me if it is used modestly.

Present-day digital design tends to use plain, bright colors, frequently in sophisticated gradients. Don’t forget that there is often a big difference in the same color online and offline. The screen emits light, and that makes the difference. In addition, different materials and textures also make the same color look different. Colors and textures substantially shift the shade of the color, depending on the reflective properties and the white balance.

It’s almost impossible to make saturated cold colors — cold green, bright blue and everything from blue to violet — look good offline. Without backlighting, they don’t contribute much. Orange Pantone also looks much better online than offline.

But such problems are largely manageable now, at least partially. New chemical paints containing light-reflecting particles have come on the market, and thanks to these particles, these colors show a very subtle gleam. But most print shops don’t use such paints.

Throughout the years, my relationship with photography has developed and matured. My relationship with the world has changed as I have learned to see, to notice. A photographer continues to photograph, even without a camera in hand. I see every day as a countless series of photographs. Color is a component of these photographs, and I act as colorist.

My relationships with color developed gradually. At first, I mimicked other creators. I love how photographers Harry Gruyaert, Esther Teichmann, Saul Leiter, Sarah Moon, Pieter Hugo and Araki Nobuyoshi work with color. Sergio Larrain, Anders Petersen and Irving Penn are very strong in black and white. Then I finally found my own photographic style, and I have stayed with it. I process all my images by combining Photoshop and Lightroom from Adobe, more or less always going through the same manipulations in the attempt to recover the sensation felt when taking the photograph.

My photographic work is less intellectual than sensitive. I like chiaroscuro. I love green forests, and I usually process my pictures by adding a yellow cast.

Julien Coquentin

Visit site →

Julien Coquentin is a self-taught photographer who lives in France and Canada. He began a career in photography at the age of 34 and juggles it with a second job as a night nurse. Julien’s first photographic series, Early Sunday Morning, was devoted to the streets of Montreal and was posted on his blog. Julien’s photographs are a kind of personal diary — the main themes are childhood memories, moments of city life and reflections on the interaction of nature and urbanization.

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.

Max Orlov

Julien Coquentin

Oleg Paschenko