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.