Colour theory: how colour in creative is pivotal to making us feel
For a multitude of winning works at D&AD Awards 2023, their creative excellence hinged on their use of colour. Whether precise grading to create an accurate homage to an iconic film, or conjuring nuanced references to local craft and culture, colour has elevated these works, demonstrated true innovation and helped to land a message. Rosalind Jana is an art, fashion and culture writer, who writes for publications and platforms including Vogue, The Guardian, Apollo, Prospect, ArtReview, i-D, British Journal of Photography, and the BBC. Here, she takes a tour through colour at D&AD Awards 2023.
If sex began in 1963, then colour crashed into being in 1939. On the cusp of the second world war, The Wizard of Oz was released – a teenage Judy Garland stumbling out of sepia Kansas into a brash, technicolour land of emerald cities and ruby slippers. The 1930s was a pivotal decade for colour. Although we often jump straight to its post-war presence in film and photography, the 1950s ushering in the golden age of MGM musicals and peppy advertising, much of the groundwork was laid two decades earlier.
This year, several exhibitions have sought to re-centre these earlier days of colourful image-making. In Switzerland at MASI Lugano, Werner Bischof: Unseen Colour revealed a brighter side to the Swiss documentary photographer: studio experiments featuring green-eyed cats and ink unspooling in water, documentary photography of a monstrously vivid Europe ravaged by war. At the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery Yevonde: Life and Colour continues to revitalise the career of Madame Yevonde, a society and portrait photographer who dressed up her subjects as silvery goddesses and red-lipped huntresses. Both photographers began in the 1930s with tri-colour cameras, where three different plates were exposed in different colourways and then developed together.
“At first, colour was a commitment. It took time, money, bulky kit and technical know-how.”
At first, colour was a commitment. It took time, money, bulky kit and technical know-how. It was also a philosophy. It was viewed with suspicion by the lofty advocates of black and white photography, and frequently deemed to be insincere, artificial, and – shudder! – commercial. To seriously employ colour required a singular belief in the merit of one’s work.
Gucci Exquisite, January Productions
Today, we take colour for granted. It surrounds us on all sides, permeating every aspect of image and design. It is so ubiquitous that we often forget about it, acknowledging its presence as given without much further thought. But it remains a key tool in our communicative and creative arsenal, with the capacity to be just as startling as those 1930s experiments. The Serbian-born and Scottish Borders dwelling textiles designer Bernat Klein, also the subject of a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, observed in his memoir Eye for Colour that “colours are as important in our lives as words are; and words cannot be used as substitute for colours. Colour… can express the whole gamut of human emotions.”
Look at D&AD’s winning entries this year through the lens of colour, and you’ll find a varied and often vigorous set of expressions. We all know that red is forceful, suggesting danger, passion and power, and yellow is, by turns, mellow and anxious. But particular palettes and shades also conjure strong moods or associations. In the case of Gucci Exquisite, a campaign by the Italian luxury label that won a Wood Pencil for January Productions and colour grader Simona Cristea, colour brings a shot of simultaneous nostalgia and recognition. In recreating a series of scenes from iconic Stanley Kubrick films including Barry Lyndon and The Shining, the brand developed a colour grade that paid direct homage to Kubrick’s rich cinematic language.
The Big Rollout, F&B Happy
As Klein also observed: “just as words can be used in many ways – to conduct a factual business correspondence, to explain a personal and vital point of view or to crystallise and express a lifetime of experience and feeling as in a poem – colours too can be seen and used in many significant ways.” Among its many uses, it is an especially effective tool for teasing out or redressing connections with the natural world. Jesse Adler, who was shortlisted for the Future Impact award, makes pigments extracted from fungi. A mycological alchemist, Adler uses mushrooms, lichens, yeasts and moulds to create an abundant, renewable source of colour – with her dyes already used by designers including Rejina Pyo. Elsewhere, Lessebo Paper received a Wood Pencil for an activation promoting its climate-friendly papers. Produced in a mill in the densely forested area of Småland, Sweden, the company has used the same timber and lake water source since 1693. Its latest creation is a series of environmentally friendly papers in 48 shades, from purple haze and bubblegum to the subtleties of sweet mint and arctic blue.
Alchemical Mycology, Jesse Adler
Sometimes, it’s just about what colour encourages us to see. Oatysis and Bright Woo Studio won a Graphite Pencil for The 24 Solar Terms Series, illuminating the distinct solar stages in the Chinese agricultural calendar with a series of voluptuously illustrated posters: abstracted landscapes and cloud formations aiming to educate viewers about seasonal shifts in a way that combined the factual with the beautiful, its palette soft and saturated.
As a communicator, colour is not only direct and effective, but good at playing with expectation. Words cannot be used as substitutes for colours, but sometimes the two work gorgeously in conjunction. Ilai, shortlisted in Type, Design & Lettering, brings a new spin on Tamil with its psychedelic 1960s and 1970s spectrum of colours, while F37 press, shortlisted in the same category, created a colour font with an authentically varied texture, ensuring that no two letters near each other look the same. It is a subtle effect, colour mottling through from beneath the black text. For Swee Kombucha, colour imparts crucial information. Winner of a Wood Pencil and shortlisted for Packaging Design and Branding in FMCG and Micro Enterprise, the 100% natural drinks manufacturer used different bespoke colours and patterns to create infographics representing the percentage value of each ingredient – turning what could be a boring list into an endlessly malleable set of eye-catching graphics.
Swee Kombucha – 100% Natural, Bedow
Although we might take it somewhat for granted in our daily lives, that is not to overlook the growing cultural appetite for meditations on colour. In recent years a kaleidoscope of books have been published on the topic, including Kassia St Clair's The Secret Lives of Colour, Patrick Baty’s The Anatomy of Colour: The Story of Heritage Paints and Pigments, Karen Haller’s The Little Book of Colour: How to Use the Psychology of Colour to Transform Your Life, James Fox's The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, Laura Perryman’s The Colour Bible: The Definitive Guide to Colour in Art and Design, Caroline Young's The Colour of Fashion: The Story of Clothes in 10 Colours, and Lauren MacDonald’s In Pursuit of Color: From Fungi to Fossil Fuels: Uncovering the Origins of the World's Most Famous Dyes. Individual colours get a look in too. Michael Pastoreau’s ongoing The History of a Color series began with black in 2008 and has just hit white fifteen years on.
Although each of these books claims their own patch (art history, fashion, psychology) they share some key features. Most of them riff on the wide-ranging symbolic and practical applications of colour. They dig, however briefly, into the science of perception and the way light hits the eye. Painting techniques, sumptuary laws, etymology, mythology, nature and shifting social mores recur frequently. Pink falls in and out of favour (with Barbie fever in the air in 2023, it’s currently at an all time high). Everyone from Goethe to Derek Jarman can’t get enough of blue.
“As a communicator, colour is not only direct and effective, but good at playing with expectation.”
Online, interest in hyper-specific shades also proliferates. For a number of years, fashion retailer SSENSE ran the Color Story series where writers dug down into the ambiguities of ‘Terminal Green’, ‘Burnout Orange,’ and ‘Worry Yellow’. Katy Kelleher, author of The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption, continues to write a set of missives that began in the Paris Review with Hue’s Hue: an essay series on the intricacies and intimacies of verdigris and periwinkle. More recently, this has been turned into a Substack series called Color Stories, where Kelleher tackles heliotrope, oxblood and blue raspberry. These shades become useful frames for free-wheeling reflections on everything from manufacturing to charged memories, with that colour as the thread – or pulsing vein – that strings everything together.
Royal Mail – Pride, NB Studio
We respond to colour via this carefully woven mesh of symbolism, recollection, feeling and cultural code, our reactions always hovering somewhere between the personal and the collective. Colour is never neutral because we are never responding to it in the abstract, never looking at it for the first time, but bringing with us a density of knowledge: what it has stood for and accumulated in meaning, its many uses both mundane (road signs, high vis vests), and rousing (painting, couture gowns), what it continues to stir in us.
Other projects recognised by D&AD this year knowingly work with this web of associations. Royal Mail’s Wood Pencil-winning Pride stamps illustrated by Sofie Birkin – the first to feature a queer couple kissing – are a riot of colour and optimism. At the other end of the spectrum, Colors of Love, shortlisted in the Media categories for Collaboration and Events & Stunts, innovated by removing colour altogether. Created in a collaboration between Pantone and SOS Homophobie and executed by TBWA\Paris, it offered a solution to those who wished to visibly show support to LGBT communities during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, a country where homosexuality is still illegal. Each traditional colour in the Pride rainbow was represented by its corresponding Pantone code: this white flag carrying the symbolic weight of its instantly recognisable cousin.
Colour is always with us. We are enveloped by it: in what we wear, what we watch and what we absorb of the world constantly spinning around us. Often our desire to write or learn about it seems to come from some need for understanding. How can you quantify the sensation of being in a slinky green dress, the experience of standing under a sky that blusters from blue to grey before brightening again? What do you learn from the history of purple? Often though, like Klein, we are trying to go beyond words. With colour, all you can do is really feel it.