Basics #02 Color system
A color system designed for recording, communicating, and reproducing
When you hear the word persimmon color, images of ripe persimmons shining against the blue sky on a sunny autumn day come to mind. People may start talking about how they like it so ripe that it melts in their mouths. In this way, expressing a color with a name has the advantage of stimulating the imagination and creating a sense of emotion, but if the name is unfamiliar, some people may not know it or imagine a different thing. I will.
Color names are attractive when used in daily life, but they are difficult to use when used at work, which is why a color system is needed. The need to systematize colors and express them numerically increased in part due to the development of mass-production industries in the 20th century. Advances in the technology of artificial pigments and dyes have made it possible to produce the same color stably, which has led to further systematization. The 20th century can be said to be the century in which a system was devised to make colors more practical.
It is helpful to have knowledge of the mechanisms of color systems other than those handled in your field of expertise, so be sure to organize them.
Color system = color system
A color system is a system that attempts to quantitatively represent colors for recording, transmission, and reproduction, and is expressed as a "space" with three directions: a color mixture system and a color development system. There are two. A color mixing system is expressed as a color mixing system, which is expressed by the characteristics of a color stimulus, and can be conveniently expressed numerically. A typical example is the XYZ color system. A color development system is expressed as a color appearance system, and is generally expressed by arranging colors according to three characteristics and scaling them. Typical examples are Munsell color system and NCS.
CMYK color model showing the colors that can be expressed by mixing ink colors
Printed materials use subtractive color mixing, which uses the absorption of light by ink to express colors. CMYK is an acronym for cyan, magenta, yellow and key plate, and CMY is generally said to be the three primary colors. Generally, a color chart is used that shows the colors that can be expressed using CMYK ratios.
It is easy to show the color of objects and is used in the product field.
Munsell color system utilized
This is a typical color development system that uses color samples. A color system based on the American painter Mansell's ``A Color Notation'' announced in 1905, modified by the Optical Society of America in 1943 through visual evaluation experiments. is. This is a system that facilitates communication and recording by understanding color as three attributes: "hue," "lightness," and "saturation," and expressing it using the Munsell symbol "hue, lightness, and saturation." It has been incorporated into Japanese industrial standards (JIS standard color chart since 1958) and is used in a wide range of fields, including visual colorimetric surveys and marketing surveys. The basic hues are R, Y, G, B, and P, and the in-between YR, GY, BG, PB, and RP are added to make 10 hues.
The principle of color harmony is easy to understand
Ostwald color system
A color system based on psychophysical considerations. It was developed by Wilhelm Ostwald in Germany. Colors are represented by three mixing ratios: ``ideal white W,'' ``ideal black B,'' and ``ideal pure color F.'' Some people may remember having trouble creating the Ostwald color system, but it is a system that can be easily referenced when considering color schemes, as evidenced by the fact that it is easier to harmonize by combining items with the same ratio of white and black. Let's say.
Color system and standard color chart used in each country
There are other color systems that have been incorporated into the industrial standards of each country, so confirmation is required for each country.
The NCS color system was created from a wide range of perspectives, including psychological feelings.
natural color system It was announced as Color Atlas in 1979, and was incorporated into the Swedish Industrial Standards in 1990, and later into the Norwegian and Spanish standards. Based on Hering's theory of opposite colors (the idea that human vision involves functions corresponding to three opposite colors: red-green, yellow-blue, and black-white), it was developed mainly by the Swedish psychologist Johansson. It is a color system created based on the concept of expressing how much of a psychological primary color is contained in a psychological quantity (visual impression) using a psychological scale. Chromatic colors have four psychological primary colors, Y, R, B, and G, and the hues between them are expressed by degrees of similarity and classified into 40 hues. It is expressed so that the sum of pure color, white, and black amounts is 100. Since the system was designed from a psychological perspective, it is said to have good correspondence with color names, and its ease of use in design has been praised.
Industrial standard DIN used in Germany
The industrial standard DIN (Deutshes Institute fur Normung) used in Germany was incorporated into the German industrial standard in 1955. By developing the Ostwald color system, we aim to realize a uniform color space and express it using three attributes: hue T, saturation S, and darkness D. Hue is divided into 24 hues and is displayed as numbers from 1 to 24. Although it starts with yellow, it seems to be based on Goethe's color theory. Saturation starts from 0, which is achromatic, and goes up to 7, and darkness is expressed from 0, which is ideal white, to 10, which is ideal black.
In addition, in Germany, there is a standard color chart called RAL, which is published by the German Product Safety Labeling Association. In 1927, the company released its first color chart for the industry using Buntton (hue), Helligkeit (brightness), and Buntheit (saturation), and in 1993 it announced a color system with 1,688 colors.
BS used in the UK
British Industrial StandardsThe color chart approved by the British Standards Association that has become a hot topic in Japan is BS5252, a framework for architectural color coordination.
Hue (a typical hue selected from the Munsell color system, a hue that achieves as much harmony as possible based on Moon-Spencer's theory of harmony, etc.) Grayness (apparent amount of gray components, with the maximum being A, It consists of 237 colors based on three attributes: (5 levels with E being the clearest), and weight (adjusted to be equal because the psychological weight varies depending on the hue even with the same grayness). This system makes it easy to realize the theory of harmony, which states that if the weight and grayness are the same, it will be easier to harmonize.
Practical use in Japan
NCD-Hue＆Tone System
The Japan Color Design Institute announced it as the Design Tone System in 1967. Based on the Munsell color system, the concept of tone (color tone) is organized by the balance of brightness and saturation, and it can be treated as a two-dimensional matrix of hue and tone. It is a system that is easy to use for color marketing, such as aggregation by color and tone. It can be said to be a color chart that displays the entire image using 130 colors, the world's smallest number of colors.
November 26, 2014
Text by Japan Color Design Institute
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