My work at ColorMetrix has me too wrapped up in the technical aspects of color to remember that yes, “of course colors have sound!” It took my friend Cynthia Thomas’s tweet shared in the image above (and as the title of this post) to remind me of that. She was responding to a message I sent out via Twitter questioning the attachment of a particular sound to a color.
Analytics, business and creativity
I’m a businessman; first, last and in the middle. I spend a great deal of time analyzing markets and developing marketing strategies for our products and services. When I’m not doing that, I spend a good deal of time helping design our new products and keeping the development of those projects on track. My days are consumed by facts and figures.
If you read the previous paragraph carefully, however, you’ll see what I began to realize a couple summers ago. Most successful entrepreneurs approach business much like a member of the creative community approaches a new project. We aren’t strictly accountants, project managers, salespeople or even CEOs. We are all those things and it takes creativity to strike a balance between all the functional aspects of running a company. Also, you will be hard pressed to create new products or the marketing campaigns that sell those products without tapping into your creativity.
As I read Cindi’s message after a long day of crunching numbers, I was struck by how right she is. The sounds associated with colors play a vital role in how we use those colors in design.
The sounds colors make for me
Here’s are the sounds I hear when I think about several colors.
Red – Breaks locking up, screeching tires.
Green – Engine gunning, squealing tires.
Blue – The blues as in music.
Magenta – Drums and symbols banging with no particular musical aspect to them.
Why those sounds matter
When I’m working on a product or website I think about those colors again. I want those colors and the sounds associated with them to result in you taking an action.
Red – Stop and read me or look at me.
Green – Click me and get started with the sign up or purchase process.
Blue – Slow down, take your time and read this. There’s good content in here.
Magenta – Crazy, kind of nutty content that might make you laugh.
Do you look for multi-sensory solutions to the marketing challenges that you face each day? For example, if you are a wine drinker, consider that you look at the color of the wine, smell the bouquet and finally you sip and taste the wine. You do all this while feeling the weight of a leaded crystal wine goblet in your hand. You may have even run your hand over the custom printed and embossed label on the bottle as you admired the seven or eight color printing process used to achieve the printed art. It’s the combination of all those sensory inputs that leads to your overall experience; not just any single input like color.
Interesting concept here Jim. With that outlook on color it becomes very contextual. Imagine how many decisions we knowingly make each day (99.9% of them we don’t even know we make). How each day forms out opinion of colors from birth.
I would find it near impossible to trigger the same response in more than a small percentage of people (depending on the context of the color usage coupled with other elements). Once we take away our own context we can tap directly into instinctual definitions. Hard edges = danger. Bright colorful colors = danger. Both make you take notice. Then our brain classifies the detail. Green = health, prosperity. But then you have to wonder, how did we gain these instincts over time?
Was it because of the context we viewed them in from the early days of evolution? If so, are the colors themselves really what we react to or is it our instinctual reaction to millions of years of context?
Joshua,
You comments make my head hurt :)So which came first the context or the perception? That’s the question right?
And the takeaway is ignore my own context and focus on the instinctual definitions?
*sigh* more answers than questions. Back to my lifelong quest for knowledge and learning 🙂
That is, indeed, the question. Did we add the context ourselves through learning with time? What if other planets have the complete opposite color theory? We would need to relearn everything. It’s not that far out there if you think about it.
Colors, and design, are highly geographical. While the basis of green may be life, health, etc it will always have additional layers built upon that from our own experiences as children, culture, etc.
It’s an interesting spiral of definition and meaning. 🙂
I’m going back to math where 2+2 usually equals 4. 🙂