One Design, Four Palettes

The idea: color

Color is the element produced when light reflected from a surface reaches the eye. It has three properties: hue, its name on the color wheel; value, how light or dark it is; and intensity, how pure or dull it is.

In a notan: A notan in the studio has exactly three colors, one for each thing paper can do. The Front is the face of the sheet. The Back is its reverse, seen wherever a piece has been flipped. The Ground is everything that is not paper: the holes, and the space around the sheet. Recolor them and not one cut moves, yet the design can change completely. The shapes of a notan are held apart by value, and hue and intensity ride on top. A palette that keeps the three roles apart in value keeps the design legible whatever the hues; a palette that sets two roles at the same value can make a cut disappear, however bright the colors.

Color is the most changeable element of a notan and the least structural. The cuts decide where paper is, where it has gone and where it has landed; the three colors only decide how those places look. That is why one design can be calm in one palette and loud in another, and why a beautiful palette can wreck a design: if two roles land at the same value, the edge between them dissolves, however different the hues.

Josef Albers argued that we almost never see a color as it physically is, because every color changes with its neighbors. A notan puts that to work: the Ground appears in two settings at once, inside the holes, where the Front frames it, and in the gaps between flipped pieces, where the Back does. In this activity you recolor one design four ways, test each palette against a gray value plan, and try to make one color look like two.

Art history

Artists have long treated color as a matter of relationships rather than recipes. Each work below shows an idea this activity uses: one design in many palettes, colors that change their neighbors, opposites set side by side, and colored paper as a tool for seeing it all.

• Arthur Wesley Dow The Derelict, or the Lost Boat, 1916 Cleveland Museum of Art

  Dow printed his color woodcuts himself and inked the same blocks with different colors from one printing to the next, so that a single design could suggest another season or time of day. The shapes never change; the palette changes the mood.

• Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms (Prismes électriques), 1914 Centre Pompidou, Paris

  Prompted by the new electric streetlights of Paris, Delaunay built this large painting from arcs and circles of color set edge to edge. It draws on Michel Eugène Chevreul’s law of simultaneous contrast: colors that touch push each other apart in both hue and value. In a notan, every cut edge is such a meeting.

• Henri Matisse The Snail, 1953 Tate, London

  Matisse cut these shapes from sheets painted with gouache and arranged them in a spiral. He also called the work La Composition chromatique, and it sets complementary pairs side by side: red and green, orange and blue, yellow and mauve. They are the same opposite pairs the studio’s painter’s wheel uses for its Complementary harmony.

• Josef Albers Interaction of Color, 1963

  Albers taught color with sheets of colored paper rather than paint, because paper gives flat, exact colors that can be moved and compared again and again. His exercises include making one color appear as two and two different colors look alike, and one chapter asks simply which of two colors is lighter. That is the skill this activity trains.

Design today

Brand designers rarely give a color only once. A brand guide usually lists each color in several systems: a Pantone number for spot ink, CMYK percentages for process printing, and RGB values and a hex code for screens. The studio’s color cards work the same way, reading one color as RYB, CMYK, HSV or RGB with a single hex code underneath that never changes. Limited palettes are also a production choice. Every extra ink in a print run means another plate or screen, and often another pass, which is why two- and three-color jobs, from gig posters to risograph zines, are so common.

Designers also make sure that color never does value’s job alone. About 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of color vision deficiency, most often difficulty telling certain reds and greens apart. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines therefore ask that color not be the only visual means of conveying information, and designers check palettes in grayscale and with color-blindness simulators. A palette whose parts still separate as grays will separate for nearly everyone.

Warm-up

Value sort, ten minutes. Spread out a handful of colored paper scraps or paint chips and, without talking, arrange them in one row from lightest to darkest. Then check the row: squint at it, or photograph it with a black-and-white filter. Most rows hold a surprise, such as a strong yellow far lighter than its neighbors, or a vivid red or blue that turns out darker than it seemed. Note the colors that fooled you.

In the studio

Make it in Studio Notan, where every cut can be moved, refolded and undone.

1. Open your notan in the studio and make a value plan first. Keep the black Front and white Ground, and type #777777, a middle gray, into the Back card’s hex code and press Enter. Now the sheet is dark, the pieces middle and the ground light. Export this version from the File menu as Artwork, PNG. Every palette you make will be judged against it.
2. Palette one: a harmony. Set Color space to HSV and give the Front a strong color by typing a code such as #2952A3, a deep blue. Click the Front card’s padlock to lock it, then press Triad under Harmonies. The Back and Ground take the other corners of the triangle at the same saturation and lightness as the Front, so the palette is planned in hue but not in value. Move only the V slider of each card until squinting at the design matches the plan: Front darkest, Back middle, Ground lightest. The harmony stays armed while you do.
3. Palette two: one hue. Keep the Front locked, bring its V back near where it started, and press Mono. The Back comes out 25 points darker in lightness and the Ground 25 points lighter, on a scale the V slider does not show: one hue at three steps. The order has changed, because now the pieces are darkest and the sheet sits in the middle. Squint. If the design no longer reads, press the ◀ and ▶ arrows under the wheel to rotate the three colors through the roles until it does.
4. Palette three: the trap. Press the armed harmony again to release it, open the lock, and type these codes: Front #DA3A3A, a red; Back #008B00, a green; Ground #4F6BED, a blue. Their V sliders read about 85, 55 and 93. Now squint. The three sit at almost the same lightness to the eye, so the design sinks toward one flat gray and the cuts all but vanish, although the hues could hardly differ more. V measures only the strongest of a color’s three lights, not how light the color looks.
5. Palette four: your own. Choose three colors for a mood, such as a winter morning, a festival or a storm, and set them any way you like: the wheel, the sliders, a harmony or hex codes. Then test them against the plan. Put the gray PNG beside the screen, squint at both, and adjust brightness until the two designs break into the same three masses.
6. One color as two. Keep your Ground and look at it in two places: inside a hole, surrounded by the Front, and in a narrow gap between flipped pieces, pressed by the Back. Change only the Front and Back, one light and one dark, or one warm and one cool, until the two patches of Ground look like different colors. A gray ground framed by a strong red, for instance, can take on a faint green cast.
7. Record all four palettes by hex code, export each as a PNG and lay them in a row beside the gray plan. Which keeps the design easiest to read? Which sets the mood you wanted? Send your favorite with the Share button and ask a classmate to name its mood before you tell them.

With paper and paint: Mix Three Papers, Then Cut

Matisse cut from paper painted to order: his studio assistants brushed sheets with gouache in colors he chose, and the cut shapes were pinned up so that they could be moved before they were glued. Mixing your own papers teaches what the studio’s sliders hide. On a palette, one move changes more than one property: white lightens a color and dulls it, black darkens it and can turn a yellow olive, and a touch of the complement quiets it. Paint also shifts as it dries, so the value plan has to be checked on dry swatches, not wet ones. Once dry, your papers work as Albers’s did: flat colors you can lay side by side, compare and move until the three roles hold apart.

1. Start from the plan. Look at your gray PNG from the studio and write down which role is darkest, which is middle and which is lightest. Choose three colors for them, from one of your studio palettes or new ones for a mood. For a first recipe, set Color space to RYB and read each card’s parts of red, yellow, blue, white and black. Your tubes are not the studio’s idealized paints, so treat the recipe as a starting guess.
2. Mix and swatch. Mix each color on the palette, adding the strong paint to the weak a little at a time: a touch of blue or black changes a lot of white. Brush a stripe of each onto a scrap of the same paper and let it dry. Squint at the three dry stripes, or photograph them in black and white, and adjust until their light-to-dark order matches the plan.
3. Paint the three papers: the Front on one square, the Back on the other and the Ground on the large sheet, and brush a spare strip of each for later. Mix enough of each color to cover its paper in one go, because a second batch rarely matches, and lay the paint on in smooth strokes, all in one direction. Let everything dry until the paper no longer feels cool against the back of your hand, then press any curled sheet flat under a heavy book.
4. Check before you cut. Overlap a corner of each dry paper, squint, and photograph them in black and white. If two roles have landed at the same gray, repaint one now; once the cuts are made it is too late.
5. Glue the Front and Back squares together, unpainted sides facing, with glue stick over the whole surface so the layers cannot part at a cut. Draw four to six simple shapes on scrap paper, cut them out as templates, and trace each lightly against an edge of the sheet on the Front, in pencil, or in white pencil if the Front is dark.
6. Cut each shape out. Lay the sheet, Front up, on the Ground, then flip each piece over its edge and lay it, Back side up, in its mirrored place. Before you glue, squint: the sheet, the holes and the pieces should break into three clear masses. Then glue the sheet down first and each piece after it, with its edge lined up against the edge of its hole.
7. Albers’s test in paper. From the spare Ground strip, cut two small squares. Lay one on the spare Front strip and one on the spare Back strip, side by side, and compare them. They are the same paint, yet they will rarely look the same: the colors around them push them apart, as they do inside the holes and between the pieces of your notan.
8. Take it to the window. Look at the finished notan in daylight and then under a lamp, beside the same palette on screen. Paper reflects the light that falls on it, so its colors shift as the light changes; the screen makes its own light and changes far less. Which version is truer to the mood you planned?

Take care: Cut on a self-healing mat, drawing the blade away from your body with your other hand behind the metal ruler, and have an adult supervise all knife work. Some artists’ gouaches carry health warnings, so choose non-toxic paints with the ACMI AP seal, especially for children; cover the table, let paint dry fully before cutting or gluing, and rinse brushes before the paint dries in them.

Take it further

Carry the recipe the other way. With Color space on RYB, set each card to the parts of red, yellow, blue, white and black you actually mixed, and compare the screen with your paper: the studio’s paints are idealized, so the two will drift apart, and where they cannot reach a screen color at all the studio offers a Nearest mix. Or try Albers’s harder exercise in paper: make two different painted papers look alike by choosing what surrounds them.

Reflect

• Which palette kept the design easiest to read, and what did its values share with the gray plan?
• Why did the trap palette fail, when its three hues are so different?
• Where in your design did the Ground look like two colors, and what surrounded it in each place?
• If you were choosing a brand palette tomorrow, what would you check first, and why?

What to look for

• Four palettes are recorded by hex code, and each is exported as a PNG.
• In the successful palettes, the sheet, the holes and the pieces separate clearly when squinted at.
• The learner can explain, using the V readings, why HSV brightness did not predict value.
• At least one palette makes the Ground read differently inside the holes and between the pieces.
• The painted papers, photographed in black and white, fall into the same light-to-dark order as the gray plan.