COLOUR ME PICKY

Dick Pountain/11 April 2001 14:01/Idealog 81

I've been fascinated by colour ever since childhood. When I decided, around the age of nine, that I wanted to be a scientist, one of the things that prompted me was to find out why the world is coloured, not black-and-white like the telly (hint, it's the electrons). My first ever 'lecture' before an audience was at school when I gave an illustrated talk about dyestuffs to the Erasmus Darwin Society: it was a disaster because, feeling nervous and overcautious, I'd made the solutions that I mixed to create azo-dyes in a test tube too strong, so that instead of scarlet I got deep dark diaorrhea, and instead of emerald green, fresh-cow-pat. When Dennis Publishing first started, back in far off hippy days, I used to do colour separations by hand using ten shades of gray-toned Letraset, and my party trick soon became telling people what colour their shirt/dress/wallpaper was expressed in CMYK *from memory*. Eek.

Later in life I devoured books about colour theory, from Newton's prism to the sheer weirdness (and wrongness) of Goethe's scheme, from Kandinsky's inspired (if slightly whacko) theories of colour movement to Josef Albers stark and rigorous paper-cutting exercises, to Harold Land's contextual theory. The best present I received last year was John Gage's wonderful tome 'Colour and Culture', a compendious commentary on colour theories through the ages.

Going into computers was both good news and bad news for this minor obsession. Good news in that a computer is potentially a wonderful tool for playing with colour. You can get an understanding of colour by playing with an interactive colour picker (the palette in Paintshop Pro will do fine) - trying to match real world objects in all the different views, RGB, HSI, CMYK - that would take years of practice with oil paints. The bad news is that until fairly recently PC colour displays were borderline, and operating system support was plain awful. My first experience of the shareware movement came from writing a little utility to allow people who had 8-bit graphics cards to use a 256-colour palette inside MS-DOS applications, instead of those grisly dithered colours in the standard palette. In my experience many computer programmers have an appreciation of colour on a par with their appreciation of music and soft drinks (magenta on lime-green, Nine Inch Nails, and Jolt respectively) and it was not until Microsoft began to grow up in the late 1990s and hired real graphic designers that things started to improve. Now even the humblest system comes with a High Color/Full Color display and themes, so one might say that everything is looking rosy (or Eggplanty, or Desert Sandy).

What prompted these random thoughts, as so often, a recent discussion on Cix. In the course of a protracted argument about subscription renewals a story popped up that even surprised a serious chromophiliac like myself. Someone had remarked that when measuring the response rate to renewal forms, it had been discovered the colour of the text used significantly altered the response rate, to which someone replied that they had just been working on a Web site which had been praised by its users as much easier to navigate, friendlier to use, and even quicker to load than it had previously been - when all they had done was alter the background colour a few shades, and nothing else had been touched at all. A few days later I read an article on food additives in the weekend newspaper, describing some experiments in which volunteers ate a meal of steak and chips that had been dyed odd colours (blue chips) but which looked normal under special lighting: everyone tucked in until the normal lights were switched on, whereupon several of them were actually sick. Pretty powerful stuff this colour then, with enormous potential to stir emotional responses.

This being so, I'm longer ashamed of having such a bee in my bonnet about colour on computers. Whenever I get a new computer, or install a new operating system, the very first thing I have to do is to change its colour scheme to my own preference, as I find it unbearably irritating to work with the standard colours. This has little to do with Windows themes as I'm not all that bothered what colour the window frames and title-bars are - what drives me nuts is the bright white background that every single on of those themes has in common. It's too harsh, like staring into a fluorescent light all day, and I can feel it straining my eyes after 5 minutes. After years of experimenting I've found that a slightly warm grey background is the easiest to look at: the standard Windows grey has too much blue in it and is too cold. The exact shade varies from one monitor to another (and between CRTs and LCDs) but it's always somewhere around Red: 216, Green: 204 and Blue: 184. However when you change the window background from white you may find there a still a very few crap programs that have been written with black-on-white text hardcoded into them: the only one I still use is the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary. To complement my scheme I make the menu highlight orange (R:255,G:128,B:64) and the title-bars and greyed-out text two darker shades of warm grey (use the Luminance slider). Try it, it will make your CPU and hard drives run 50% faster, honest....