feel mostly dependent upon color. Color can effect you both physiologically and

psychologically. You can make somebody feel something with color. Piss them off. Yeah. Color is

everywhere. It's just pervasive all throughout our lifestyles, our culture. Whether or not

you're verbalizing it, you're actually saying something to the world: "This is me

because I'm wearing this color."

Most people know color.

You know color, you use it every day. You interact with it. That's how you make your way

through the world and the color perceptors in your eyes are rods and cones.

Cones start with a "C" and they perceive color, your rods perceive

grays. Color theory, as a definition, it's more the mixtures and implementation of

combinations of color.

Color is the umbrella under which hue, value, and chroma rest. Hue being the

distinction between different colors on a wheel from red to red orange, so to speak.

Value being light and dark and chroma being bright and dull. The color wheel is a

tool that helps us talk about the physical phenomena of light and how we

perceive it and how we ultimately implement it in designs and the combinations.

We now teach more based on the harmonies and contrasts and how it relates to how

you utilize color. So students learn about complimentary colors which tend to be

opposite one another and clash which is just two colors but they're one-off of

complimentary. I think that there's been many different types of wheels and so I

say to students nowadays, I don't mind if you invent your own wheels with

your own nuanced understandings of color because you're a different human than

whoever came before you and who knows what you'll come up with invents the future

that we haven't even seen yet.

So, you get a lot more interaction with color nowadays on multiple levels and

people are aware of this. They know that they're affected by it soulfully and not just

mentally. And you should take that strength in your soul to build your own

understanding because it is so personal and you change.

Color, for me, is what I call sort of a silent language or an emotional language

that we all sort of intuitively know how to speak. As we see color we start to

associate it with different things in our lives. We have three different types

of associations: universal,

cultural, and individual.

Individual color preference is a really interesting dynamic. I think color

trends play a part in color preference. Quite often though, it may be associated with an

experience.

There are definitely universal aspects to color and they are usually the

physiological ones. So red is definitely the one that increases your heart rate when

you first see it. It makes you want to move. There's some studies that actually say

that you'll walk faster, you'll eat more, you'll talk more when you're, let's say,

in a red room than any other color. One great example is you think of the red carpet.

Well, there's a reason why the red carpet is the red carpet and that's because it keeps the

traffic flowing.

Where, conversely, when you see blue the opposite will happen. So you become

more calm and relaxed.

I think the one that is most interesting is the cultural differences.

For the most part it's usually a learned response. So when you're very young you

might think of brown as dirty and earthy but, as time goes on, you learn to

adjust those associations. So, all of a sudden, when espresso and coffee became a whole

new trend, brown took on a whole new association. When we start to think of

things like recycling or environmental concerns it's natural for us to

think of green. So we develop different types of associations that we share

with other human beings and, as we grow, those become more and more meaningful to us.

I've gone back through the twentieth century and and I found that there were some

ebbs and flows of color and it's just an evolution of a shit not a revolution.

Color is not the place where I look

first. It's the why behind it; the economic, the social, the political, the

technological, environmental influences. They're all the drivers of

why color is always evolving and revolving.

With the economic issues that we've had in recent years, people gravitate to safe colors,

grounded colors rooted in the past and rooted into the ground.

So you bring up, what we call, organic colors and as we get familiar with

that, there comes a time when we need a pick me up. So take the familiar and just add a

little accent of something new and give you a totally new look. Here we were

with the depression. People were so depressed they needed to put color back in their

lives so they colored glass and that's where depression glass comes from. Go back to the

Sixties and we saw the psychedelic colors coming in because of the drug

culture. Just pattern on pattern, color on color and it was just a kaleidoscope of

everything happening all at once. And in the Seventies we had rest for a decade.

We browned out and,

remember the decoupage and almond and beige and browns of the

nineteen-seventies. So, in forecasting, we look at those kinds of trends, what are

constant, but also something new and different for the forecast in the future.

As like a gif

artist you can only use two hundred and fifty six colors. I think the restriction is really

cool. It's like something common that all gif makers have to think about when they're making a gif.

You work within this resolution

that, in today's high-def,

you never see so it almost gave it an aesthetic just because it was so

constrained. It's minimalism.

It lets the viewer fill in the blanks.

It's communicating with people via imagery. We like to experiment with

different types of film. That's why you never see the

same looking portrait

shot. You get like different colors that you wouldn't get with your perfect camera.

Like a VHS camera brings out the oranges and

makes everything super-saturated. You almost can't fake that kind of color because

of the way the colors interact with each other.

You can always make a rainbow move

because there's so many colors to cycle through.

You don't even have to be choosy on the colors as long as

you have all of them in there. I'm like a black and white fiend. You know, like, the

conscious decision of not using color and

making it work. Black and white is bold. But then you throw in, like, a little red.

It'll make that red pop just that much more. Variety, you know, like if you

see our page. If it was all color or all black and white, it wouldn't

have much impact.

When it comes to colors, though, you want to think of like what colors match before you even

worry about what colors you can't use.

And like you can make anything as long as you make it look intentional.

It's like a taste of nostalgia.

It's also like the challenge of trying to convey an idea in these blocks.

Usually people think picking the color for something is pretty simple but it

actually gets complex pretty quickly.

Color's emotive and I don't think it ever stays static and so you're

looking at color in a different way of accenting it rather than changing it abruptly.

It's just that you have to learn to identify it and codify the language: how do I arrange them

and how do I speak about that arrangement so that other people understand what I'm creating or doing.

Use black and white sometimes.

Colors are just fun, man. I just want to, like,

inspire people to make fun stuff.