WEBVTT

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Why do we see color? Designers intuitively  know the answer to this question:
It's to help us distinguish one thing from  another and even to understand the thing itself.
And what I mean by that is if you're looking at  someone's face and they look very pale,

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maybe with a yellow cast or a blue cast, we might understand that that person is sick or something is wrong;
or, we're looking at a series of tomatoes,
each one more ripe than the next – we are clued in to when the tomato is ready to eat.
Maybe we're looking at a subway map and we see that each line
is a different color, helping us to understand

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which line we want to go on and where we want to go to.
Along with shape, texture, movement, darkness and lightness,
the more color that we could see, the more we could interpret about the world around us.
By using color, designers are giving people a shorthand for how to use the products that they are designing.
For example, if you are designing a pill bottle with pills inside,

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the color of the bottle and the color of the pills themselves can distinguish not only from other pills
that someone might be taking but even different dosages between them.
Things like a traffic light, which, sure we could memorize what
the order of the traffic light is, but having *color on top of order* gives us
an incredibly quick and easy mechanism

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for our brain to understand what to do next.
Even things like sports uniforms –
the reason that we have different colors for different  uniforms is that it gives fans that immediate clue
as to what to do when someone runs down one side  of a field or another: do we cheer or do we boo?
Just as important to the question of "Why do we see color?" is:

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Why do we not see all the colors that are in our vision at once?
And I'm not talking about ultraviolet or infrared or colors
outside of the ability of our color vision.
I'm talking about when we look at, for example, a red house and
one side is in shadow and one side is in light;
we're not seeing that house as partly dark red and partly pink.

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We are just seeing it as a red house, and there's a very good reason for that.
Just as I don't feel every sensation that is  happening to my body every minute, like my glasses
on the bridge of my nose – I'm not thinking about that until I actually think about it.
My feet on the floor, that sensation – I'm not aware of it until I bring my mind to it,
and throughout my body, there are all kinds of sensations going on all at once;

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but it would be too much for the brain to be thinking about those things *all the time*
on top of all the other sensations that we have, one of which is the light that is entering our eyes.
So, if we were to register the millions of colors that are coming into our eyes all at once,
our brain would just shut down; it would be too much; we wouldn't be able to make our way through the world,
to make decisions, to move – all of these things.
So, this becomes very important for designing because we have to decide

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what we want the *focus* of people's attention to be.
If we go back to this idea that color gives us information to help interpret the world,
then we have to think about: "How are we using color
so that it is giving us the right information to give us the right interpretation?"
So, too much color, too much sensation, and then what follows we call *perception* – what we're actually

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perceiving – can be confusing.
Too little color might not give us enough information.
We also take our clues about color
from the *culture* where we live.
So, for example, in the Western world,
yellow is not a color that is particularly beloved, but in the Eastern world, it is.

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So, the messaging that comes with the colors that you choose depend on *who* is receiving that color.
We also have very personal associations with color  which make it hard for designers because we don't  
know – unless we're designing for one person – what  each person's reaction to a color is going to be.
And lastly, we have these *biological reactions* to  color, which at this point we know very, very little about.

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So, when you go on the internet and you read, for example, that peach makes you hungry, the color peach,
well, we don't know that at all – that's just a bunch of internet fake news.
But we do know certain things about blue light, for example,
or about the color red, and there are associations – biological –
rooted in our biology in these colors that  have an effect on us.

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But taken together with the cultural and the personal,
there's lots and lots of clues that are being given to a person,
and these have to be accounted for in the design  process – maybe not the personal part,
but certainly the biological – the little that we know – and the cultural piece of it.
So, to sum this up, why do we see color? We see color to help give us information
so that we can make our way through the world

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without harming ourselves and hopefully with helping ourselves.
And color is this extraordinary tool, and it's one with a very fine point.
It's one that was developed late in the development of the human brain.
It is not essential to our being alive;
take color-blind people, for example,
but it's one that gives us the opportunity to be  able to navigate quickly, easily and often with joy.