Color: Is the Medium the Message? William J. ‘Bill’ McCalpin, EDP, CDIA, MIT, LIT General...

Color: Is the Medium the Message?

William J. ‘Bill’ McCalpin, EDP, CDIA, MIT, LIT

General Manager

Xplor International

Xplor International

Xplor International is the worldwide association of the users and suppliers of the products and services that create, modify,

and deliver customized information using a variety of document technologies.

See www.xplor.org

William J. 'Bill' McCalpin, Xplor International

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Life Was Simple

• In 1980, “life was simple”

• Transaction printing was free of color, free of graphics, and often limited to 4 or fewer fonts on a page

• Printing an inverse font was considered high art!


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Things Have Changed

• Now transaction print is full of color

• …and variable data, too…


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Color Communications

• We in transaction printing tend to think of color as an eye-catcher, not a vehicle for communication

• But what happens when we communicate information with color?

• Some unforeseen results…


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Color and Your Body

• All humans react to certain colors in the same way

• For example, there is virtually no food in nature that is blue

• In fact, blue, purple, and black often occur on poisonous foods

• Hence, blue light or blue dye or even blue plates suppress the appetite


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Color and Culture

• Color is often a non-verbal method of communicating something within a culture

• For example, the color green:– is a sign of spring and fertility in the West – so much so

that the early Christian church banned green as being pagan

– is the symbol for Islam in much of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia

– “Green is bad. When Chinese says a person is wearing a green hat, it means that his wife is having an affair.”


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Color and Culture

• Just think:

• If your company is red-hot, that’s good, but if your company is in the red, that’s bad.

• If your thumb is green, that’s good, but if your face is green, that’s bad.

• If you’re true-blue, that’s good, but if you’re just blue, that’s bad.


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Color and Culture

• In the U.S., yellow stands for cowardice, but in Japan, yellow stands for courage.

• In the U.S., boys and girls are “blue” and “pink”, but in China, they are “black” and “blue”.

• In the U.S. and Europe, black is for mourning, but in China and Japan, white is more commonly used for mourning….and in Egypt and Burma, yellow is for mourning!


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The White Feather

• A White Feather – what does it mean to you?

• Giving it to someone was formerly a gross insult in many English-speaking societies


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The Yellow Ribbon


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The Story of the Yellow Ribbon

• This story was an oral tradition in the 1950s. It was a story about a convict returning home, who asked relatives to place a white ribbon in an apple tree if they wanted him to return.

• In 1971, this story was written up in the New York Post, but the ribbon was yellow, not white.


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• In 1972, this story was printed in Reader’s Digest and was the subject of a movie shown on ABC-TV.

• Shortly thereafter, the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” was registered for copyright.

• In January 1975, Gail Magruder, wife of Jeb Stuart Magruder of Watergate fame, decorated her front porch with yellow ribbons to welcome her husband home from jail, which was nationally televised.


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• In 1979, the use of the yellow ribbon mutated to express the desire for the return of the imprisoned hostages from the American embassy in Iran.

• This spread throughout the American culture…until the First Gulf War in 1991, in which yellow ribbons were used to signify a desire to be reunited not with convicts, nor with hostages, but with any American soldier serving overseas.


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• So, in the US, the symbol of a yellow ribbon has changed from the hope to see a returning convict to a returning hostage to a returning soldier – in a way, a complete reversal.

• And today in Japan, there is a movement (see http://give-peace-a-chance.jp/eng/) which uses the yellow ribbon as an anti-war symbol, in part because yellow is a symbol of peace in Japan.

http://give-peace-a-chance.jp/eng/


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Color On A Bill

• A company added red text to a bill, in order to catch the eye

• But the customers saw “red” instead!


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Color But No Communication

• About 8% of all males and about ½% of all females have some sort of color deficit.

• This translates to more than 11 million Americans, and more than a quarter billion people worldwide.

• Thus, a company that is sensitive to its customers with disabilities must consider colorblindness whenever it uses color.


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Ishihara Test


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Using Color

• A person with color vision sees hats with 5 separate colors: yellow, red, green, magenta, and blue

• Suppose as part of your color marketing piece, you asked the customer to pick the red hat?


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Deuteranopia

• A person with deuteranopia (the most common red/green colorblindness) may see: yellow, brownish, brownish, dark brownish, and blue

• If you asked your customer to pick the red hat, what would he/she do?


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“Daltonize”

• Stanford University came up with a way to enhance photos for (some) colorblind – especially those with deuteranopia.

• This process is called to “daltonize”.

• “Daltonize” was named after John Dalton, the person who first wrote about colorblindness in 1794.


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Full Color

• The photo on the right shows a merchant with 5 colors of produce in front of him and to his left.

• The produce is orange, yellow, red, green, and red.


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Deuteranopia

• However, someone with deuteranopia cannot readily discern the red and green produce.

• If the shape does not provide enough of a clue, then it appears that there are only 3 types of produce here.


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Daltonize

• Using the Stanford algorithms, the red and green objects are altered so that there is a noticeable contrast, and 5 different items reappear.

• You can do this by visiting www.vischeck.com


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Standards

• In the Spring 2000 issue of Xploration, Elisabeth Gooding of APT noted that one of the differences between print and the Web was that the Web had “ability to extend brand with color, sound, animation.”

• But now, print has the ability to match brand color, even with variable data.


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Standards

• Thus, print people can learn from Web people the best practices for print and color

• For example, there is a W3C standard “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which become a “Recommendation” (i.e., standard) on 5-May-1999.

• One guideline is to never rely on color alone to communicate information.


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Standards

• 2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.

• 2.2 Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen.

• For example, when asking for input from users, do not write "Please select an item from those listed in green."


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US Government

• In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

• This is covered under Section 508

• See http://www.section508.gov/


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Footnotes

• “White Feather” photo from http://www.viparagliding.com/

• References to green on “Color and Culture” from http://www.colormatters.com/

• Photo on “Color and Your Body” from J.L. Morton at www.colormatters.com, and references on slide from same site

• Photo on “The Yellow Ribbon” from http://www.fhp.state.fl.us/html/TroopA/events.htm (Florida Highway Patrol)

http://www.viparagliding.com/

http://www.colormatters.com/

http://www.fhp.state.fl.us/html/TroopA/events.htm




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Footnotes

• “The Story of the Yellow Ribbon” based on work developed by the late Gerald E. Parsons at the National Folklife Center, part of the Library of Congress (http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html)

• All the slides related to colorblindness including the photos are from www.vischeck.com

• The information on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) on standards can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife/ribbons/ribbons.html

http://www.vischeck.com/

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

Color: Is the Medium the Message? William J. ‘Bill’ McCalpin, EDP, CDIA, MIT, LIT General...

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Transcript of Color: Is the Medium the Message? William J. ‘Bill’ McCalpin, EDP, CDIA, MIT, LIT General...