Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
- Paul Klee

Though our eyes can distinguish millions of different shades of colors, our color vocabulary is limited in comparison –  about thirty words in all.  As a species, those  words enter vocabulary at a snail’s pace, using  a sequence that remains much the same from culture to culture.

All languages have words for black and white. Red is always the third color to have a word associated with it, followed by green (or yellow) and then yellow (or green). Blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey follow suit.

There are a few  variances to this general pattern.  One African tribe has no word for green but six for red. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue. There is no Old English word for orange.

Personally, I like the fact that red is always the first color to get a word. This reinforces a notion I have about red, white, and black being the most striking color combination there is.

Source: The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher

Imagine picking up an object and suddenly experiencing a flood of voices filling your mind, not from a physical location near you but from anyone, anywhere– perhaps even from people who lived hundreds or thousands of years before you were born.

Now imagine that the object you’ve picked up is a book.

The ability to read to oneself is a remarkable gift.  How strange to think that these little black and white scratches on white paper could carry  so much power.

In terms of the evolution of writing, design, and typography, the ability to read silently came about suddenly and changed everything. In the Western tradition, writing was previously designed to be read out loud as part of a religious ceremony. Books were rare and incredibly valuable. With the invention of the printing press,  books became much more common and inexpensive, and could be privately consumed at a tremendously faster pace.

The human eye entered into these ancient conversations with a hurricane-like force, transforming them profoundly and permanently.  Older letterforms were strongly vertical, resembling spires and steeples. They slowed the eye with their lack of contrast between letterforms and repeated verticals.  These forms were suitable for reading out loud, but were a great hindrance to those reading  silently.

The Roman forms that replaced them had  much more contrast between the different letters.  The eye could build these forms into distinct shapes without having to decipher each letter.  The vertical emphasis was replaced with a slant roughly corresponding to a right handed person holding a pen.

Almost overnight, a visual language based on the structures of authority became replaced with a visual language based on the needs of the audience and the physical  interaction between a human body and a piece of paper. This was the birth of humanist letterforms, which are still most easily read fonts in use today.

Gothics to Romans

In many ways, the progression continues today as our communications continue to cater to their audience.  Communicators who understand and act on audience preferences will have a distinct advantage over those who don’t.

Emperor Penguins

Who doesn’t like penguins? I’ve always loved them, but I hadn’t learned until very recently about how they’re camouflaged.

When swimming, their predominantly white bellies help them blend in with a reflective water surface when seen from from below by predators such as orca whales or leopard seals. When seen from above, their dark backs naturally blend with the darker water below.

I’m struck by the cleverness of this ruse, a little object lesson in thinking contextually, and how even the most high contrast combination can help something stay hidden under the right circumstances.

Spikes Bursting Through Grid, view 1 (concept and art by Michael Brill).

I think the essence of thinking about communication challenges is stepping outside one’s own skin, embracing the illusion that one can see something from someone else’s point of view and adopting their mindset and values. I believe it is the creative person’s role to be flexible by accommodating the audience’s point of view.

But what if we know next to nothing about the audience? Can such an audience be communicated with at all?

This is the challenge of marking a WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, a project also called the “10,000 year test” or the “forever problem.” This is an effort to warn future human beings about the presence of intensely toxic nuclear waste — very likely the most enduring human creation.

The site in question is near Las Vegas, set nearly half a mile underground, within caves designed to collapse within 1,000 years to seal the pollution in place. The waste will remain will remain toxic for 250 times that long.

Landscape of Thorns (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).

The concept of communicating to people 10,000 in the future fascinates me – and not just because I’m envisioning it next to the ruins of Las Vegas.  Are we speaking to Flintstones or the Jetsons? The challenges are many. How do we create something that can last that long, that can be understood and believed and that people won’t want to steal or to explore?

I’m thinking of the Egyptian tombs and the curses their makers intended to surround them, and how violators were threatened with judgment in this life and the next. I suspect scary “keep out” burial faces are common to many cultures (and museums), and are probably more interesting than dreadful to many. A big lesson we can learn from them is: don’t be interesting, beautiful, crafted, or valuable. Don’t make something people will want to explore, study, or steal.

I’m struck by the thoughtfulness of the project concept, the physical design, and the use of communications without use of language or symbol.  To me, the solutions they present address a fundamental human condition in a way that paradoxically makes them akin great art.  However these sites are marked, I hope the WIPP project is successful.

To read more about this project, click here

Figure 4.3-15. Forbidding Blocks, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi).

In thinking about creative work, I’ve found it helpful to employ two different ways when approaching the work: self expression and problem solving.

Self expression emerges from the individual point of view of the artist – unearthing a person’s interior thoughts and feelings and building connections with other people through the work.

Problem solving is based on thinking about the function in more objective terms – communicating a idea to particular audience, emphasizing one thing while downplaying another. On the surface, it’s not really about the creative person at all.

Years ago, I went to a presentation where the speaker said he views his job as a communicator like that of a plumber, charged with the task of moving water from one location to another. The person who said it was a master at his craft, using marketing communications to grab attention and communicate value.

I was struck by the concept of comparing  traditionally “artistic” elements such as illustrations, photography, and writing with laying pipe and wondered if accepting the garb of a trades person made it easier for people to accept the scenario he presented, in which success or failure could be objectively proven in such a straightforward way.

In my mind, it defines the single most important characteristic of excellence in marketing – the discipline of sizing up and solving a problem by seeing it through a different set of eyes but, paradoxically, still trusting in your own intuition and creativity to evaluate the work honestly and accurately. It’s a perspective that I try to cultivate in myself and with my clients, and I encourage you to use when thinking about your own marketing work.