Color In Sight I A Documentary on the Details of Color in Design by TEALEAVES

[Music] you just look at things just look at everything the color of that or the shape of that or whatever look at in the natural world and it's not like I'm making bullets or something like the stuff that I design in making so it just makes people happy it doesn't like make them sick or make them sad or hurt them or any of those things I guess when people are in our product you want them to feel good about what they do whether it's a sport that they're very aggressive about or it's something that they just they're just casual some of it's just pleasure like looking at food and appreciating that aspect of the eating experience you know each color evokes its own message each color gives its own message it's saying something before you get the chance to go to the next level of that nuance it can come out a brand it can command emotion it can reflect a memory our hope is that don't say something before you even try them you may have 20 to 30 people working on the same thing how do you make sure that everybody's on the same page you need a language of [Music] you ninety-five percent of what happens is really out of your frame of consciousness you're not even aware of it 95% of what influences with you with color is emotional it's not crash not only 5% is rational especially in context with information you know I could put the word happy if I put the word happy like in like a weird you know like off black against black well it's not gonna mean happy it's gonna mean some weird inverse ironic statement of happy you know at one period of time a significant portion of the food supply was unsafe if something was not the right color or didn't smell right where was that was a cue that we were not to eat it so I mean that's you know that there there I've been evolutionary where rules or reasons for us to have and be able to make those distinctions over time how do you make it in a different way that that is familiar but at the same time consumers are a little kind of surprised with what how exactly did you do that when you're looking at a product in a store three seconds do I like it do I not do I not like I'm gonna walk away not interested color can set to a career of a company leave coke coca-cola changed from that red to like some kind of like it's kind of a dull brown we're gonna go out of business explosion that internally was referred to burn and bite in the back of the throat it's that Wow right that happens and it's on the back of your tongue and is that red absolutely because you don't see cola tips color colors colors boring you see that red color that they've associated there are many products that are well designed that can not get the traction they deserve because the colors not right caller plays into a texture plays into a graphics play into it all of that is part of the fluidity of creating this amazing product at the same time when it's done people would say I want to be seen in that especially in track and field more than any other Olympic sport is all-around how how dominating do you look and down to the point where in preparing before an event if you watch they come out with like five or six layers of clothes on even if it's 85 degrees and they slowly take away they're slowly taken sort of the covers off to get down to the armor which is the final layer and so you're watching your competition back and forth of the one they got out on there there you know what's sometimes even the shoes are covered or they put on a final pair right when they're down for that a little but first off of house so many of these athletes especially in Olympics want colors that matched to their country so he's from Jamaica and the colors are our green yellow and black and what he wanted was the plate to be gold for very specific reason he viewed himself as the fastest you know animal in the world out there of course cheetah was the one that is the fastest you can do 60 miles an hour so he said you know let's do a cheetah pattern that mimics this animal that I am so sort of fond of it and study and when you get into really studying the cheetah print through the head in the ears it's a very small pattern and then it expands as the body goes back so that the size of ellipses they're not circles or ellipses up through the ears and the nose of the neck or maybe a third the size is the earth the back of the body so you know we studied we went to the zoo and you look at the Chi doesn't you look at it okay explain them and you can kind of really get a feel for how sometimes nature really makes things look fast when maybe they aren't so cheetah looks fast and it still so that's what we invoked into the shoe and the colors we tried a range of things but those colors are hard to work with because well if when we and we talked earlier when you do black too much black it looks slow and we pick that up right away so there were a range of color ways that were done the white one was the one we put it in the tip because again when you're watching the top down I'm seeing white lightweight almost angel like with this cool print and then the darkest color is in the back of the heel with then comes back up through the leg so it almost looks like that green just flows back up through a sock and then into the the power of the leg look at me look at how cool I am don't I scare you and that was all part of it because you look on look at those shoes why he's really gotta be fast if he's putting that stuff on and he's all hooked and all of a sudden how did I train hard enough can I beat this guy and so it's all about trying to put just a hint a hint of doubt in your company predator because the track and field stuff it's a tenth of a second it's that fast silver silver to bronze I mean gold abroad it's that fast tens of seconds so it's wiped out I can put into your mind it is I've already won and we have anyone garments two blocks yeah in the design process part of my goal has always been to think about it at the very beginning one of the things that I think is the mistake is to use color as a band-aid to act as if it can come in at the end and you're just going to tape over it and it's going to say something that you want it to say well when I compose a dish at journey what it's about is first it's about the season so what happens is that season generally gives you different color profiles to be able to use so as we get into summer we use orange we use red we use all those beautiful summer colors as you progressively go into fall it's mushrooms and it's darker colors and then winter turns into this aspect of black and white so just by changing the things that people are thinking about that the color reminds them of you can actually change their preference for the color so it's say we have a specific shade of red and we show you lots of strawberries and ripe fruit and flowers that are as positive and associated with red you'll come to like red more than someone that we show blood and guts and lesions that are negatively associated with Fred look look I want to bring back all the color I want to bring back like fantasy and whimsy and humor you know you could have the same object many different colors and some course use and they have to touch it you have to pick it up you know and once you pick something up then it's got you so OPI got him to color in 1989 and we looked at the nail-polish category and it was really just a number and a color didn't have personality it was an aspirational it wasn't fun or sexy via OPI I realized that that was missing the most asked for a question from everywhere editor in the world is how do you come up with those things it happened I was at a wedding at the Natural History Museum and this young lady was pouring wine actually missed the glass and half of it was pouring down my dress and she said to me I'm not really waitress I'm an actress I'm like oh my god have I got something for you and the name I'm not really waitress was born which is kind of a candy apple red it's a great red because it really fits all skin tones it's really said to women you can be anything you want to be you know I'm not really a waitress I'm an editor I'm a flight attendant I am a mom a homemaker I'm an executive so everybody could relate to that color and it really said to women you can be anything we want to be in this pod it gave them permission to to wear nail polish and can say look at me Here I am if you think about it I can look at my hands and nails all day without having to get up and going to a mirror but your nail color I can look at my nails when I'm typing when I'm on the phone then I'm mush motioning and I'm talking and I love how my nails look all day and it makes me feel good Linkin Park after dark from the Chicago collection a color that really revolutionized how women look at perceived color where dark nail polish became chic and bearable you know before if you were dark color it was really kind of there in grungy and not for everybody but you know the dark color became mainstream people ask me who do you design shades for and I say for my daughter who's 20 - my mom was 93 and everybody in between when we would do concept work there would be all kinds of colors that you would just sketch up a range of things and you would you could influence a decision of desire by colors so often times we just went to kind of shades of grey to really emphasize on the design first the lines and the proportions in sort of the the symmetry of the design and then bring color in so I usually will think about the color before I even thinking about the design especially like planning out the product line from the company because you know we're gonna release something like 120 different products over the course of the year and the ideal customer is a collector that has them all and so I don't think about what's it all going to look like together on a big shelf I have to pull back and I have to listen so with my process what I want to understand is what that color needs to do in order to make it have a connection so what I try to do is to be empathic to a situation and Pathak to a need and Pathak to a place empathic to a person we don't want it items to be the same shapes but we can carry through like themes in color and or ranges a color or feelings or counterpoint like this one's white this one is black together they look you know there's a lot of that thought out too so I have a joint wall laid out with either all the products we're going to make or an exemplar that's close to it just so you can see a rhythm of color and pattern across the whole thing and if the whole wall is pleasing to look at as an enemy than I know that it's worked [Music] we made a decision to start a color of the Year Program for lack of a better word when we saw how much angst there was around the new millennium coming up the world's gonna fall apart is my computer gonna break down what's gonna happen you know you have that half the population the other half going how exciting moving into 2000 no matter what goes on in the world we're always looking at it here's what's taking place now what does that mean for color how do we take this message and communicate that out in the language of color because essentially that's what Pantone is the language of color what we came up with was cerulean blue because we felt that this color best expressed what was taking place and we're really what people needed and we look at a lot of different industries to get this particularly you know industry is that a long lead and movies medium what's coming up in 2000 you know 20 and in the case of coming up with marsala it was a very conscious effort with the color that was different than what people would typically expect because the past couple of years have been brighter shade you think about the brights it was honeysuckle pink and I said I mimosa and tangerine tango emerald green was really about unity and bringing people together radiant orchid freshness newness unique and modern and where are people now we're having technology coming at us we're going crazy we want to de-stress we want to unplug we want to do yoga we want to meditate we want to decompress we want to turn off we want something a little bit more muted and when we saw the shade and it was more saw I thought okay that's really good number one it brings to mind the Marsala region in Italy and so you're thinking wines even though it's not a drinkable wine it's a cooking wine but it also plays into where are we we want the that are gonna feed us one things as our the nurturer so what better way it's not just feeding our soul spiritually it's also feeding our soul physically we may be talking about all these different colors and then you have a cataclysmic event that's the thing that can rock the world of trend if I go back to the financial crash all of a sudden you could see it's like my eyes could close and you knew they were going to be neutrals on the selling floor you just knew it because all of a sudden people are gonna be nervous about spending money I'm gonna spend my money on things that are investment things that a neutral stay that stand the test of time but I think that our team at Pantone who is coming up with color trends have been doing this for a very long time they're very attuned to what's happening and you can't divorce trend from the culture everything is so interwoven in what's taking place [Music] around 2003 I was playing ultimate frisbee at a tournament in Santa Cruz California and I was wearing a pair of glasses that I actually manufactured in my laboratory that were made out of glass that had melted and ground and everything and I was selling these to local laser surgery companies for the surgeons to wear to protect their eyes during laser surgery and the word had got back to me that the surgeons were stealing the glasses and using them as sunglasses so I had this vision of them driving around their Maseratis and Ferraris with their sunglasses on up and down the coastal highway of California and I thought that's cool I should do that to him so I had them at the tournament and a friend of mine said can I borrow your sunglasses he put them on and I didn't know it at the time but he was color blind and he said oh I can see the cones he couldn't actually see the fluorescent orange cone on the green background they were the same color but when he put the glasses on you could see them things like I can see the red traffic light I can see the red stop sign that I can see the green leaves from the brown leaves [Music] it's this might seem really mundane but I get the biggest thrill of walking around with somebody who is trying the glasses on for the first time and observing how they interact with the world differently and it goes something like this what is that lavender and then you've met I'm immediately thinking as a scientist like how do they know what lavender is well if I had to define lecture I'd say that it in luxury it's really the details that matter and in particular I would say that color is so important in what we do whether it be from the inside of the packaging so that's from the TVs themselves to the color of the actual fusion of the TVs me to the exterior of the packaging so what's going to entice to make you excited about actually trying the different teas which is why we we partner with Pantone to help us with our exterior packaging and the teas to make you exciting to you and the culinary world there is a saying that as tea blenders we take very seriously and that is the first taste is with the eyes so as a result when we custom blend our teas for our clients we treat color just as importantly as we do taste and aroma so in iced teas you actually lose the aroma so one of the three major components that we take into account in the hot tea which is color aroma and taste in ice - you actually lose out on the aroma so you only have color and taste to take into account as a result that elevates color even to a higher status and it would be even in hot tea and industry standards for blending iced teas currently is that you're very dark and very saturated however for ourselves we actually want to make something that looks super tasty and very exciting and enticing for people so we actually blend it lighter look curing and more amber in tonality so that when it's poured over ice it actually is reminiscent of something like a great scotch and I mean who doesn't like a great spot even though we may do details like blending for color which people may or may not recognize or know that it's there that's affecting them on any intimate level that we know it's there and that we know it has an impact of some sort you could be influenced by what's going on okay you can like get energy from it and have it trigger thoughts but if you're just gonna mimic what you see is going on now by the time it comes out people will like what he's just copying that ship or whatever there is this fear that we're gonna do it wrong and honestly the only thing we would really do wrong would be to not play or to not understand what each of these things could do just by shifting it steadily so my encouragement with any designers I'm working with with any company I'm working with is to try to engage in that form of play how does what we're doing the product from a color point of view accessorize with everything else else that's going on what's your color strategy if you designed to wear human values that you will have are longer weak and a deeper connection than you ever could to trend so I think that one of the bigger obstacles that I have is trying to communicate to my client why we're doing something you know I guess why the question is why do we continue to do things that maybe people may or may not notice or appreciate but Wyatt said our financial disincentive the way for us to be doing these taking a lot of these details into account you know why do we continue to do and when there's a lot of reasons not to be doing them and I think the reason is like why does an artist go to their easel every day and try and paint something better than what they did the day before why do people try and you know elevate or do better and they're marathons every time they run and I think it's it's personal pursuit of perfection and insight we all know it's the right thing to do [Music] [Music]

Channel: TEALEAVES

Views: 45,282

Rating: 4.9555554 out of 5

Keywords: color, design, product design, innovation, designer, kidrobot, frank kozik, tealeaves, pantone, enchroma, nike, herman miller, cornell food and brand lab, ubc, color psychology, color strategy, marketing, advertising, marketing communications

Id: IhmoFo3cGDQ

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2016