UX Prototyping
04 Oct 2025
People sometimes don’t see what’s right in front of them
I have a skeptical student
Two people look and one person sees. That person will win.
Two people look and one sees
You can observe a lot by watching
— Yogi Berra
〈pause for color video〉
Color is an enormous concept, recently explored in the CHI community by Shugrina et al. (2019). It can be the subject of entire semester-long courses in several disciplines, including psychology, neurology, biology, and optical science.
I would like to limit my further discussion to two issues among the very many that should be of interest to you as designers. The first is education about color and the second is color words.
Josef Albers was without peer in educating art students about color in the twentieth century. His kit, often referred to as a book, is called Interaction of Color. Its most important sentence is perhaps “Color is the most relative medium.”
Following are quotations from color word research contributed by a previous student.
The website mentioned on the previous slide continued as follows:
A prominent doctrine in linguistics and anthropology holds that each language and culture expresses a unique world view by its particular way of slicing up reality into named categories. (See Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
arstechnica on color name history ran a sad and funny article in Fall 2015 on the names of colors as used in computing, from the X Window System project in the eighties through contemporary CSS3.
Typography began in earnest in the 1450s. (There had been typesetting in China 200 years before this but the art invented there was never communicated outside a small community and was not widely known until archeologists in the 20th century rediscovered the long-lost artifacts.)
La Vita Nuova
Traditional typography for a given page of a book represents three widely recognized challenges, legibility (ability to distinguish each letterform), readability (of the entire page), and color (technical term used to mean ink density).
This a sub-discipline of cognitive psychology that is the source for many studies of reading comprehension and comparisons of various contributors to reading comprehension, including typography.
In the film AI (2001), the character portrayed by Jude Law is invited to choose from a context sensitive menu by the holographic cartoon Dr. Know, as voiced by Robin Williams. When the Jude Law character asks about a concept, Dr. Know asks for the context in which he asks, since the concept has different meanings in different contexts.
art nouveau connotes fairy tales
basic writing connotes primal