Last Thursday night, we were lucky enough to attend the ASID Color Theory seminar at the Denver Design Center. The seminar was hosted by Decorative Materials, and the speaker was Feras Irikat, the Director of Design and Marketing for Stone and Pewter Accents. It is safe to say we had our minds blown! Feras was an incredible speaker who kept us interested and laughing the whole time, while also imparting invaluable knowledge about the psychology of color, and how we see and understand color in the world around us. We learned SO many things, but today I just wanted to share a few of the very most interesting facts that Feras shared.
1. No two people in the whole entire world see color in the same way. The way each person views color is based off of a very specific mixture of the way their eyes see and their brains work, and also their individual life experiences.
Example: Nobody is born with a particular love or hate for a certain color. Think about a color that you particularly dislike. At first, you may think that it is just and ugly color, but if you really think about WHY you don’t like that color, and consider where in your life you have seen that color and experiences you have had that would lead you to associate it with something negative, you might begin to understand why you have such strong feelings towards that color in particular.
Image via Design Seeds
2. Each color is made up of a certain number of “ingredients”. The more ingredients that a color has, the more difficult it is to pinpoint, and the more it can change in different lights.
Example: In the seminar, we talked about the color Khaki. Khaki has a lot of different ingredients, so when you look at inside under artificial lighting, it may just look beige. Then, when you take it outside into a different light, it can look green, or yellow or any other number of things. This is why with more neutral colors, you might think something is a perfect match for another color, then get it home and take it out and think “what in the world was I thinking? This looks terrible!!!” This is one reason that lighting is so important in design.
Image via Google Images
3. Colors have a huge impact on peoples’ emotions, and this is mostly due to how the brain sees them.
Example: The color red exudes a sense of power. The color blue exudes a sense of trust and honesty. Feras suggested that wearing one of these two colors to a job interview would trigger subconscious emotions in your future employer that would sway their opinion in a favorable way.
Image via Pinterest
4. The way we see color changes with age.
Example: Over time, our corneas begin to yellow. This makes things that younger people see as blue instead take on a green hue. This can be why different people may disagree on coordinating colors.
Image via Forever Chic Style
5. Color names have a huge impact on the way people respond to the color itself.
Example: In the seminar, Feras used the example of Vera Wang’s line of professional apparel for women. One season, she presented a line with a beautiful and unique color called “lilac”. It didn’t sell. At all. A couple of seasons later, the exact same color was presented in a new line, this time with name “monster”. Everyone had to have it. Isn’t it funny how that works?
6. Our subconscious is more alert and aware of our surroundings than we think it is.
Example: Here is a REALLY interesting video on how our subconscious works in ways that we would never even know. It’s a few minutes long, but so interesting and definitely worth a watch!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8WBOiXJwU0[/youtube]
Altogether, we learned some really incredible things from the Color Theory seminar. We would like to thank ASID, Decorative Materials, and also Feras Irikat from Stone and Pewter Accents for making this event possible! You can find all of them on Facebook, and if you would like to see more about color and why we love it, visit us on Pinterest!
- November 13, 2013
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