True Colours

How many colours does your computer monitor display?

The first (2-bit) monitors could manage 4 colours. Later, 4-bit monitors boasted 16 colours. Now, with 24-bit colour resolution, it’s over 16 million.

Wait a minute. How many colours are there?

A male acquaintance of mine refuses to acknowledge the existence of more than 10: black, white, brown, blue, green, red, pink, purple, orange and yellow. That, for him, is the full Male Colour Spectrum. He refuses to accept, for example, the existence of turquoise: “It’s just green that hasn’t made its mind up yet”. Or magenta: “Pink that’s in denial.” Or beige: “Brown that won’t commit”.

The reason Fifty Shades of Grey is so popular among women, he reckons, is not that men are averse to pornographic literature. It’s because they don’t find the title credible. There’s Battleship Grey and Charcoal, everything in between is just splitting hairs.

Before a typical wedding, the groom-to-be is baffled by his fiancée’s insistence that the bridesmaid’s dresses have to be fuchsia, not cerise. Pink is pink, for chrissakes. (A bridezilla in full wedding planning mode is believed to be sensitive to more than 20 million colours.)

Many men believe it’s somehow unmanly to take an interest in colours. But to puncture the stereotype, let me point out that many of my male friends are designers. Show them a random colour and they will identify the Pantone number at a distance of 50 metres. So it isn’t that men, like dogs, cannot perceive the full colour spectrum. It’s that most don’t acknowledge the importance of the tiny gradations and subdivisions within it.

Oddly enough, the friend mentioned earlier is a painter/decorator. He lives in a world of colour charts that display every hue perceived by man (and some species of bee). But this rainbow of choice does not faze him. “The client picks what they want from the chart, I just slap it on the wall. If they change their mind, I stick on another coat.” And if the client can’t decide? He opens a tin of Trade Contract Magnolia and calls it Estuary Dawn.

He can’t understand why some clients drift off the colour chart entirely and insist on mixing their own shade, to match the colour of a baby blanket or an elderly aunt’s eczema. He’s baffled by the popularity of Farrow & Ball. “Why use colours that went out of style 100 years ago, when paints were made with lead and arsenic?” Farrow & Ball, incidentally, do more than 20 shades of grey, including Mouse Back and Elephant’s Breath.

He only steps in when he believes the client is making a mistake they will later regret. Particularly when they opt for a shade he calls H-Block Beige. “Why would anyone paint their wall the colour of poo?” Fundamentally, he accepts that he is in the customer service business. “I’m not paid for my opinions, I’m paid to keep people happy.”

For him, like the rest of us involved in the creative industries, customer opinion is the final arbiter.

We agonise about capturing the right mood in the photography and finding the mot juste for the body copy. And even a 2-bit designer will spend hours getting the colours right. Last year, in fact, a designer created a colour thesaurus that assigned a name to every shade in the Pantone range. Yet many of the subtleties we devote our time to seem to go unnoticed by our clients. Clients don’t care as long as there are no typos in the headline and the logo is legible.

Or so we think.

Most people aren’t colour-blind, they are just not colour-literate. They still discriminate even if they don’t articulate their opinions. Our clients are happy to delegate the details to us, because they don’t have time to learn the vocabulary. This is not to say that they are immune to the psychology of colour, even if they don’t buy the bullshit that goes with it. They respond to the overall gestalt of the work we produce. This makes it all the more important that we pay attention to the fine details.

So although some people’s colour detection seems poor, the default setting is 24-bit, true colour mode.* We all discern visual nuances, even if we don’t admit it. Otherwise everyone’s house would be painted with Contract Magnolia.

Our painter/decorator’s house, incidentally, has a beautiful colour scheme. The walls are carefully coordinated in harmonious shades of mauve and lilac. It must be the wife’s influence. “You’re joking,” he says. “I wouldn’t trust the colours to her – she has no taste at all.” But he denies the charge of being a closet interior designer. “I may not speak colour-chart psychobabble, but I know what I like.”

*"True" colour is also called 24-bit colour. Each screen colour (red, green and blue) is assigned 8 bits, and every colour has 256 shades. So multiplying 256 for red, times 256 for green, times 256 for blue gives you 16,777,216 colours.