Interior Designers are perceived as being experts at using color. The dirty little secret is that 99% of them, maybe more, are clueless in this regard.
Advance notice of trends, and adherence to "styles" is design at its lowest common denominator.
To actually understand color, how it works, and learn how to use it, takes a bit of work. But what a wonderful set of tools that work leaves one with!
As with most complex subjects, understanding the basics of the subject provides the best basis for its creative use. Let's look at how we see color.
What we see is all in our heads- by which I mean within our brains, not at our eyes. Our eyes have receptors which fire off when they are stimulated by the kinds of light to which they are sensitive, and they transfer that data to the brain through the optic nerve.
Our eyes have two types of receptors, which we call rods and cones. The vast majority of receptors are cones, which cover our retina, and which are sensitive to value (light & dark) and to movement. Cones keep us alive- they detect a threat approaching in our perifieral vision.
A much, much smaller number of receptors are the rods. They cluster toward the center of our retina, in the location of the eye where distinct focus occurs. Rods are sensitive to hue- to which wavelengths of visible light are penetrating the lens of the eye.
Rods come in three types, and each is sensitive only to the presense or absence of one wavelength range of light. It is this filter of light wavelength type which causes us to be sensitive to and to see using additive color mixing. One type of rod is sensitive to the presense or absence of red light, one to the the presense or absence of blue light, and one to the presense or absence of green light. All other colors which we see (and there are estimated to be over 2 million of these), are invented in our brain, based on the combination of information received from the cones, and from the three types of rods. It is the cummulative information given by all of the rods and cones across the focal center of our retina which provides the data which our brain turns into an internal "picture"...our vision.
As a result of this, when a stage lighting technician shines both red light and green light onto the stage, we see yellow. When they shine red light, blue light, and green light together, all of our rods fire off, and we see the light as white. Other visible wavelength colors exist, but we only see them as combinations of the stimulation of rods sensitive to the three light "primaries", from which our brain mixes all other colors, with some guidance from the cones regarding "value".
Black is the absense of any light whatsoever. It is no data. Zilch. The reason that this blog is easy on the eyes to read is that the text, which is the content, is reinforced by being perceived by the eye as data, while the background- black- is lack of data. They eye does not look to the background for data.
For computer screens to be based on the outdated paradigm of black text on a white background -which made sense when communication was written in ink on papyrus- is non-sensical. The eye is drawn to the light in its search for meaning, which means that when we read black text on light ground, our eyes are actually looking at the negative space of the ground in order to interpret the form, and hence the meaning, of the text. Crazy. Stupid. A hindrance to communication, and a strain to the eye. Gotta be slower.
CAD drafting is done in model space, which is light objects against a black background, precisely because it is much easier on the eye. Why is this ease not standard in computer screen use?
No one's vision is destroyed by too much rest. But snow-blindness, light fatigue, happens for a reason. The rods and cones, the brain, are all working overtime trying to make sense of TMI.
All of this leads to the next subject, which is how colors are advancing or receeding, compared to each other.
