Following article is not brand promotion. Purely hypothetical discussion on Coca-Cola label.
Interactions of color by Josef Albers.
Recently, I wanted to start painting again. And I remembered my raw painting skills were never sharpened enough. Still crude, hence I struggled in choosing colors. So, I decided I should read about colors, learn about their interactions, and I was interested in the book by above name. Which essentially teaches how colors, and more importantly how our perception of colors is different from person to person. I only read first two pages of the book and realized how insightful the book is! It's all about mindfulness of what we see! Which I have written over and over again in my book and blog. I will summaries few fundamentals of the colors that we see along the way but first let's look at a Coca-Cola label.
Philosophy in Coca-Cola label
I am sure half of the world population have seen a Coca-Cola label. Including pigmies in Congo jungle. That is how far this brand has reached. Can you imagine the label? Its red color, right? But how much red is it? Is it the red color of a bright sky you saw yesterday afternoon? Or is it the red color of a pound of flesh? Or a glass of wine. As you can see there are thousands of red color shades. You may be thinking of any color right now. Let's do some more mental experiments on this.
Let's imagine you were given a red color spectrum. From light red to dark red changing hue and saturation. Even if 1000 people pointed out the Coca-Cola red, after seeing a same label shown to them, they will point out at different colors in the spectrum.
There are some other ways to see the spectrum of colors the Coca-Cola label poses and see fundamental errors in our perception. How about looking at the Coca-Cola label throughout the day. You can keep a bottle at your window and still photograph this from morning till night. Is it the same color you, see? Can you see the problem?
When we say Coca-Cola label is red color, we assume that it is some red color on the label itself. Yet, when we see the same label changes its color depending on the time of the day and lighting, or even the angle we look at it, we can see we have never seen same color ever. It is not the same red that see even if you stare at it for hours. As after 100 years of staring you would notice it is not even red anymore.
What do these observations tech us? How about following facts.
Colors that we see are in spectrum, and it is impossible to label all of the shades of colors
Just like there are infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1 there are infinite number of shades of red between any two shades of red.
There is no singular color red which we can point out. Even in something like a regular Coca-Cola label, there are infinite number of colors.
When we look closely, we can see colors are created in our mind, at the time of observation. This is why two colors can look same although it is not the same that we see, it's just imagination!
The book is about colors, so it keeps on talking about applications of these observations for colors. But as you can see this is a problem for anything that we measure for that matter.
Generalization of philosophy of Coca-cola label
How about temperature?
What about time?
How many shades of flavors a slice of bread would have? Doesn't it depend on the time of the day? How much you chew? And amount of salt that the Baker did put in it? Can you see there was never any bread taste twice the same?
But we know, bread as bread taste and mango and mango taste. Only a real Ratatouille (Not the dish but the mouse in the film) would say which bread came from which bakery. And this fact leads to another important conclusion which helps in our mindfulness practice. Which is,
Although our sensations cannot grasp there is an inherent error when we say Coca-Cola label is red, and bread you ate for lunch tasted exactly like yesterday, fundamentally they are wrong statements, yet we agree as a society to ignore the errors in our perception, so we do not sound insane. But remember the facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
What have you been doing lately with colors?
Comments