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.

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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.

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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.

Oleg Paschenko

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Oleg Paschenko is a media artist and designer and long an art director at Russia’s topnotch Artemy Lebedev Studio. His awards include bronze at the Cannes Lions and gold at the New York Flash Film Festival. He has held numerous personal exhibitions. Currently, Oleg works as an illustrator, designs books and teaches at the HSE Art and Design School in Moscow.

Sin City

Robert Rodriguez,

Frank Miller, 2005

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The Art of Caring for the Dead (2009) is a joint project with my wife, the poet Yanina Vishnevskaya. The texts are mine, the black and white photos are by my wife and the whole book uses a single color. Russian political activist Misha Verbitsky wrote in 2002: “The laws of the physical world dwindle and give way as the human civilization of the time wanes. People of the Tradition had only three colors: white, black and red, and they used the same word for them all. Apparently, the breakdown of the visible spectrum of light into distinct colors was an occurrence of a subsequent epoch. The same goes for all other physical laws — all are false insofar as our world is untrue.” My book is concerned with the border between black and white and white and black; thus, it had to be achromatic. But I also wanted it to burn and Mercury to run through it. So I introduced red. But not a blatant red. I felt the red had to be unsaturated, and I was also inclined toward an orange or scarlet. For me, however orange-red was too explicit and tautological: the book talks about fire, and presenting words about fire in the color of fire would have been too much. I wanted to achieve something dispassionate: cold fire, cool red quicksilver. I found my calm in #e71937.

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My favorite movie is Metropolis by Fritz Lang. OK, that’s a joke; let it be Sin City. The reason for this can be found in the quotation from Misha Verbitsky that I cited earlier. I love when the weapon of color is used only under great duress, when life itself is at stake, or to deliver the final coup de grâce on the viewer. Or when color is a poignant sauce, not the main dish or garnish. (and any of several other synesthetic metaphors.)

Truth be told, I had my most vivid color experiences in real life, not in a cinema or in a museum. These experiences were inextricably bound to their life contexts so it’s quite pointless to talk about them.

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The cover of the second issue of Flat File features my beloved, rather chilly, “not exactly red.” This time it is #c51b24. There is so much of the color here that it is deafening. This is something like a zombie apocalypse: all are dead but alive. This cold red is paired with black, of course, but true black is impossible here. That’s why the role is played by blue #090e22. To some extent, in this context the blue is even more black than the stupid #000000. This color combination is morbid, but it is counterintuitively precisely right.

Photo: youtube.com

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