Color Blind
Research
Foundation

Subject

Since this was an open ended project, I wanted to pick a subject that I would enjoy spending time researching and learning about. The only requirements were to make up a company, create a logo, stationary set, and a series of ads. I have been interested in how we perceive colors and light ever since I picked up Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color. Since I am affected by a mild form of color blindness, I thought that would be an interesting domain to dive into.

Vision

I started by checking out as many books on vision and light reception as I could. I found books on everything from the physics of light, to Ophthalmology, and even a really old set of Ishihara plates. I started to learn about the types of color deficiencies and how the anatomy of the eye affect our perception of light.

Logo

I explored quite a few options, but the direction that I thought worked best was one that hinted at some of the medical illustrations that I had seen. I wanted to find a way to actually represent the idea of color blindness in a simple way. In the logo I depicted light entering the eye as color, but hitting the retina as grey.

Ads

I took the stance that if vision is a fundamental way of perceiving the world, then color blindness was an issue in perception. I wanted something that could be seen in multiple ways that was somehow related to color. I coincidentally was reminded of some old GI Joe Decoder graphics that used a red film to reveal a message. By matching the color of a film and printed ink, you can cancel out some of the image and enhance other bits. I had been playing with the idea of doing bus stop ads and trying to incorporate more of the context into the ads; the glass walls of a bus stop provided the perfect structure to try out this effect. I chose contradictory idioms to overlay and then spent a ton of time calibrating the colors needed by trial and error. The result was an ad whose message was quite different depending on how color interacted with it.

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