The Dress Color: Suddenly the Whole World is Colorblind Too
I had managed to miss both social media phenoms that occurred last Thursday until late in the day. I neither saw the Llama Drama nor understood at first why people were discussing the color of a dress.
And how could people be debating between a dress being white and gold or black and blue?
The truth is everyone sees color differently
Just as people who have perfect pitch are rare in the music world, those who see color “perfectly” are rare as well. Though most people can agree on a color being blue, each might see it slightly more dark or light than the other.
The term “colorblind” is not accurate. A more accurate term is color vision deficiency (CVD.) Colorblind implies that those of us who have it are seeing the world like a Humphrey Bogart film. Black and white. Shades of gray. In truth, very, very few people have that severe of a deficiency.
Roughly 6% of the male population has color deficient vision similar to mine.
My truth is that I am a colorblind designer
I have Deuteranopia, which is often referred to as “red-green colorblindness.” While I work, I rely heavily on the numbers when it comes to color, rather than trusting my eyes. Very light greens, for example, I can mistake for yellow. Darker greens and reds are sometimes difficult to distinguish.
I’m extremely sensitive to the lightness and tone of a color. If two colors are similar in lightness and tone, I have difficulty identifying them correctly. But slight changes make things pop out.
I have a super power
One of the great things about seeing the world the way that I do is that patterns and things that break them jump out at me.
As I often drive the roads of Montana and Alaska, it is handy that I see animals that might be camouflaged to someone with “normal” vision. This would matter more to a hunter, but it also means early warning before a deer runs in front of me on the freeway.
My maternal grandfather “Momo” is likely the one who passed the gene on to me. He was amazing at jigsaw puzzles and credited his ability to match the shapes, rather than relying on the colors or patterns.
One of Momo’s brothers had one of the rarer types of CVD. He did see the world monochromatically. While this might be seen as a handicap to some, the US Army put him to work analyzing aerial photographs during World War II. Because of his sensitivity to pattern and shape, he was able to identify enemy encampments that had been camouflaged more easily than the average analyst.
CVD isn’t a handicap unless we let it be one. It’s a super power!
So what’s this have to do with the dress?
I immediately knew that the dress was black and blue. But I also understood what the “white and golders” were seeing. For once in my life, a massive amount of people were experiencing the same thing I had for years. Their eyes and brain were processing the information in a way that made them see something different than the rest of us.
So a poorly shot, weirdly exposed, oddly white-balanced photo managed to show the world what those of us who are “colorblind” have known forever. Color is in the eye of the beholder.
What does it mean to designers?
I cannot stress this enough: Do not rely solely on color to relay information. Wrap it in context.
A stop sign is red. But it’s also an octagon. And it says “STOP” on it. Three design features that keep us a little safer on the road.
Ask any colorblind person which light is on top of a traffic signal and they know without thinking. Which is why sideways traffic lights are a bad idea! Even though the light colors chosen are done so to prevent confusion, the context of red being on the top helps make for quick decisions.
I love my (very old) iPod Shuffle for the gym. But the status lights are useless to me. I don’t even bother to try to use them to see how much charge I have. Below is a screen capture using Iconfactory’s XScope and its excellent feature that allows testing of how color vision deficient people see your designs.
This screen cap accentuates the issue with relying on nothing but color to relay information.
This is a relatively close approximation of how I see the colors of the light.
The real red, btw, is nowhere near that dark. But it is almost impossible for me to distinguish the solid green from the solid orange.
Apple was limited in space in trying to relay information. So they relied on a single light and three colors. But if I can’t see a difference between those colors, the light is useless.
So if you are a designer, use color to convey meaning, but add other context around it. Shape. Position. Time (blinking lights, for example.)
Welcome to my world
I spent most of grade school, junior high and high school having that one day when my classmates found out that I am colorblind and having them hold all kinds of different things in front of me and ask what color they were.
Thing is, I often got the answer correct. And the classmates would then wonder if I was really colorblind. This was partially due to their misunderstanding of the condition.
How did I get things right? Crayola. I learned the colors by drawing a patch of color, then reading what color it was on the side of the crayon. Crayola put color in context for me and helped me learn the colors. It was essentially like learning shapes — draw a color, learn its name. Do I see the same red as you? Probably not. But I know what I see as red, and I know it is called red.
The dress was just another passing internet meme. But it was also an opportunity for everyone to realize that we all see color differently.
There are complex things happening between lightwaves reflecting, cones in our eyes gathering the information and our brain interpreting that information. Along the way, there are variables — in this case, many people’s brains tried to color correct the image for them and it ended up looking two completely different colors than reality.
Welcome to the world of the color vision deficient. Every single day, we question what we see like many people questioned what they saw in the dress.
