There’s so much to think about with color. The age, gender, and cultural perspective of your audience to name a few. The medium you’re working in, the ultimate reaction you’re trying to induce. It can be a really complicated equation.

From a biological side, perceiving color is dependent on the light sensitive rods and color sensitive cones in the human retina which can give an unmeasured amount of variance to  a color depending on their independent performance levels. It is actually possible that no two people actually view the same color in the same way since we are all biologically different—except for identical multiples, but I digress.

And to a certain extent, the use of color is a product of technology. While color has existed since the beginning of mankind (and before, but who was there to gauge it as such?…), it’s  been more easily reproduced with each step of technological advancement in the human race. Cave painters didn’t have quite the varied palette that an artist of today has, if you see what I’m saying.

And then the color management systems… PANTONE^®, CMYK, RGB, Index, and Hex are just a few that most of us use on a regular basis—all devised for different uses with different technologies. And those are just the most obvious to mention, each designed to systematize something that is otherwise boundless.

So why do I love color so much? There are a thousand reasons—probably one for every color you can conceive of.

A palette I recently created for Central Ohio Down Syndrome Society. Go to codss.org or click on the palette to see it being used.

As a designer, these two books have been almost biblical to me. (Thanks to PANTONE® and Amazon for the reference)