< home

Colour Symbols

Posted on

spacer In the book Designing with Data in Chapter 9, “Just a splash of colour”, I reference ColorAdd.net as a method to aid in determining colours. Their system uses a series of shapes to represent the 3 primary colors. Just as when you mix paints to get secondary colours, you can mix these shapes to also represent the basic spectrum. It is a brilliantly simple solution.

Recently, a member of the ColorAdd team gave a presentation at a local TEDx conference in Portugal. It is in Portuguese, no English available, but he is demonstrating the system, but also letting people know that there is a series of coloured-pencils that are branded with the corresponding ColorAdd icons. I’ve already ordered a few sets to show-off to friends.

spacer

I hope that it becomes easier and easier to use these icons and recognize them on everyday products. As they gain adoption, they could become a de facto standard to represent colours in a non-colourful way.

Checkout ColorAdd.net and start to think about places where you might be using colour to convey meaning and what is potentially “lost in translation”. Their icons could be a solution to your issues.

This entry was posted in Color and tagged color, coloradd, colour, icons, pencils. Bookmark the permalink.