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[mindfullsilence]

June 15th, 2009, 7:34 pm

Just wondering if anyone else takes color blindness into account when they create a logo for a company. Color blind people will see 2 colors as the same, but are able to differentiate between the two through shades. e.g: red-green color blindness, or deuteranomaly, means that the person is able only to see shades of yellow when they look at reds, greens, yellows, or oranges. They also see purples and blues as the same, but with different shades.

Colorblindness effects about 10% of the population of the world. In the US, about 10.5 million men are colorblind.

If you're interested, here are a couple really great tools for ensuring that your print/web designs are viewable by the colorblind:

http://colorlab.wickline.org/colorblind/colorlab/
Shows how a color looks to someone who is colorblind, in comparison to it's actual true color.

http://colorfilter.wickline.org/
Will show the specified URL as viewed by any of the various color blind types. Including images!

[graphixboy]

June 16th, 2009, 3:09 pm

Well... Personally I'm a little annoyed that the world has come to consider a highly colored complex graphical image a logo. I know this idea is perpetuated by the web but even awards annuals are filled with objects that look more like my desktop icons than a traditional logo.

Maybe I'm hanging on to an old and outdated idea but I believe that a logo should be capable of standing on its own as 1 color (preferable black) as easily as it can with multiple colors. It should also be just as recognizable on tail of a jet as it is after being sent through a fax machine (yes people still use those).

I think a well crafted logo SHOULDN'T NEED other colors to work. Look at William Golden's CBS "eye" or Paul Rand's IBM logos. Both work pretty much anywhere you can imagine.

However all that said, I do think that colorblindness should generally be taken into account when choosing colors that need to provide information (text in a logo, website navigation, etc). The bottom line is that if people can't see it they can't use it.

[mindfullsilence]

June 16th, 2009, 5:24 pm

@webcrazy:

Art is not simply color. Graphic art includes technique, lines, curves, color, flow, movement, emotion, etc. Don't disinclude the colorblind simply because they don't view one aspect of a piece of art the way we do, your statement was almost discriminatory and was at the very least improvident.

@graphixboy:

Agreed, most of what we see today are not what I would consider logos either. Like the currently infamous glossy logo. Anytime I create a logo, my first concepts are presented monochramatically, and I prefer to use only 1 color in any logo I design. Occasionally I'll outstep that bound with 2 colors; but generally it isn't needed.

[joebert]

June 16th, 2009, 6:17 pm

I wonder if people with colorblindness commonly use screen readers.

[graphixboy]

June 17th, 2009, 8:32 am

joebert wrote:

I wonder if people with colorblindness commonly use screen readers.

In my experience they do not. Typically colorblind people (actually a very high percent of males) can see quite well there are just some colors that show up as shades of gray.

For example I'm working on a site right now where the brand colors are Maroon and Gold. I had a colorblind person look at my designs and they said they couldn't distinguish maroon text links inside black body copy. Although I must admit in this specific case I have a hard time seeing the difference between maroon/black as well.

Basically the thought is to just add other visual cues to things (background, hover, underlines, etc) to show active content instead of simply relying on different colors.

[Belk Media Group]

July 10th, 2009, 9:50 pm

graphixboy wrote:

Well... Personally I'm a little annoyed that the world has come to consider a highly colored complex graphical image a logo. I know this idea is perpetuated by the web but even awards annuals are filled with objects that look more like my desktop icons than a traditional logo.

Maybe I'm hanging on to an old and outdated idea but I believe that a logo should be capable of standing on its own as 1 color (preferable black) as easily as it can with multiple colors. It should also be just as recognizable on tail of a jet as it is after being sent through a fax machine (yes people still use those).

I think a well crafted logo SHOULDN'T NEED other colors to work. Look at William Golden's CBS "eye" or Paul Rand's IBM logos. Both work pretty much anywhere you can imagine.

However all that said, I do think that colorblindness should generally be taken into account when choosing colors that need to provide information (text in a logo, website navigation, etc). The bottom line is that if people can't see it they can't use it.

Your not alone. I agree 100%

As for the color blindness. I hate to sound like an ass but, if only 10% is inflicted by this type of blindness then, thats a number I can live with. The way I see it, the color blind have learned to deal with their blindness to color and if I go and screw with their training I may confuse them. Who am I to undo all their hard work. Besides that, there are various types of color blindness, who would you make adjustments for?

October 16th, 2009, 7:46 am

Years ago a doctor said i had a slight colour perception which was not as serious as colour blindness. Apparently this only concerned my ability to recognise one colour which was green. Was never convinced about the diagnosis and thought it was because i had consumed too many alcoholic beverages the previous evening. Anyway to cut a long story short i have used photoshop etc for several years without any problems. and no it is not something i have ever given a great deal of thought to. Might be worth considering if there was too much going on in a logo or image though.

[Bogey]

October 18th, 2009, 8:35 pm

That is an interesting site mindfullsilence... thanks for posting them here