Truly Deeply/Madly

Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood never wore red, she wore grey. Roses are light black, lemons are dark white; and Italy, Ire­land, and France share the same flag. A glass of orange juice is a glass of grey juice. Blood and petrol look the same. I live in a black and white world. I am com­pletely colour­blind. I am achromatopsic. I am also a painter.

Neil Har­bis­son is a man who always viewed life in black and white, he has achro­matop­sia, a con­di­tion which means he is unable to see colours. Using a custom-made device called an ‘eye­borg’, Har­bis­son can trans­late hues into sound fre­quen­cies, he can hear colour. A scale of musi­cal tones rep­re­sents the spec­trum of colours – light hues are high-pitched, while darker colours sound bolder. It is like a hear­ing colour wheel. Where we see the sky as blue, Har­bis­son hears it as C sharp.

When he first got the device Har­bis­son often spent an hour in the fruit or flower sec­tion of a super­mar­ket — just so he could expe­ri­ence for the first time the sound of the vibrant colours. Harbisson now hears colours when lis­ten­ing to music. A female per­former at a con­cert sang in shades of yel­low while the whirr of his Hoover is red. The com­bi­na­tion of sound and music offers intrigu­ing possibilities.

Before this Har­bis­son used to rely on other people’s per­cep­tion of colours. They used to tell him that cities were grey and drab, so Har­bis­son decided to prove them wrong. He and fel­low artist and per­former, Moon Ribas, embarked on a project look­ing for the colour that defines each cap­i­tal city in Europe. Each city was rep­re­sented as a square made up of two tri­an­gles of dif­fer­ent colour. In Monaco, it was azure and salmon pink; in Bratislava it was yel­low and turquoise; and in Andorra it was dark green and fuchsia.

As a brand agency, we spend much of our lives speak­ing in visual lan­guage, I myself am some­thing of a con­nois­seur of colour. We’ve always under­stood the impor­tance of colour to cul­tures as well as to brands. From a brand design per­spec­tive, own­ing a colour in your mar­ket can pro­vide an enor­mous com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, make your brand instantly rec­og­niz­able, and pro­vide a strong sense of brand per­son­al­ity. But Harbisson’s work gave us pause to con­sider the greater role that colour plays in our lives — the deeper con­nec­tions we feel cul­tur­ally, socially and even per­haps aurally.

If you’d like to talk to us about find­ing the right colour and other visual lan­guage for your brand, why not give us a call.

Cas­san­dra Gill, Design Director.

Tags: Brand Design, Colour, Colour Wheel, Corporate Image, Creative Ideas, Design, Graphic Design Melbourne, Painting, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Corporate Image, Creative, Graphic Design Melbourne, Thinking, Visual Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.