Building an Open Colour Standard

Colour for everything, especially wool

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:38:00 +0000

There absolutely needs to be an open standard for print colour. I'm behind that and I'm working on it. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that there's more to it than print and screen. There's a world of physical things that depend on some sort of colour specification, whether loosely defined and changeable or rigid and consistent. On that first count, the loose and changeable, I've gotten to thinking about yarn and other animal proteins like silk and even human hair.

Anyone who knits knows well the pain of not buying quite enough yarn to finish a project, going back to the store, and finding that the yarn you've been working with, while still called by the same name, is a slightly different colour than before. Eventually, you learn to buy more yarn than you think you'll need, just for the sake of consistency. That's the problem with dye lots. Every batch of yarn, while using the same dye and same general process, comes out slightly different.

I'm not proposing to necessarily solve the dye lot problem. I have a hunch that a large part of it comes down to white and the inconsistency of the base colour of wool. But it has gotten me thinking. Wool is an interesting test case. It's easy enough to deal with, it has good possibilities for home brew colour experimentation and, most importantly, there's the dye. Wool, being an animal protein, can be coloured with acid dye. Or, to you and me, food colouring.

The food colouring angle is a good one. One of the biggest challenges of thinking about a spot colour system is sorting out the physical colour. It's been a hurdle in my exploration of colour for print. How, the thought goes, do you decide what the gamut of inks going into the spot colours will be? Are those colours consistent across ink manufacturers? And so on. This is the appeal of acid dye. In North America, at least, there's a handy gamut all ready to go. It's the set of dyes prefaced with the letters FD&C (food, drug and cosmetic) or D&C (drug and cosmetic). That's a limited gamut of dyes already carefully regulated by a government body. It takes away the gamut decision and just leaves questions of application and method guidelines/best practices, as well as the development of physical colours from those dyes and the translation of those colours into digital.

In short, expect some proof-of-concept wool and hair dye experiments from me in the near future.

How to (theoretically) roll your own colour matching system

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:15:00 +0000

The following gives background and advances an untried method for developing a colour matching system. It hasn't been tried yet, but I'm working on it.

The basic facts: Colour matching systems exist to standardize colour across the different parts of pre-press workflow. The dominant player, Pantone, uses ten different inks to create its spot colours. In addition to spot colour, Pantone employs its own augmented version of CMYK: Hexachrome, or CMYKOG. Hexachrome is supposed to be able to replicate more of the Pantone spot colour gamut than traditional CMYK can.

To roll your own spot colour standard, you'll need:

a light spectrometer (build, buy or borrow)
samples of ink from various manufacturers
samples of basic, elemental pigment
a precise scale
time
various types of paper

First, analyse your ink selection. which colours do the various manufacturers have in common, aside from CMYK? Once you've found a range of widely available colours, it's time to break out the spectrometer. Make some consistent colour swatches. That is to say, lay in a supply of a few types of paper. Take one of your available colours (you'll want to make sure you have a sample of that colour as produced by different manufacturers). Applying your ink evenly, create a swatch of that colour for each manufacturer. You should have several different swatches of the same colour, a few for each different brand of ink (more or less, depending on the number of papers you're testing with).

Next, grab your spectrometer. Use it to measure the different inks, comparing readings across brands. If two inks have the same readings on one type of paper, go on to the next type of paper and make sure they still match. If you get an exact match on all types of paper, score! Now see if any of the other inks match the spectrum. From each colour group, you should get data about which brands match each other exactly. Be sure to note the details. In an ideal world, it should be possible to find a grouping of different ink manufacturers who make matching products (although who knows what the success rate will be in reality). If they match across the spectrum of common colours, you've got yourself a palette.

You can use this palette as a jumping off point for your own colour mixing experiments. You'll eventually want to narrow down the number of different inks. Pantone, as mentioned above, uses ten. With a base selection of inks, consistent across several manufacturers, you can create your own custom palette of spot colours.

OCS poster, wiki

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:06:00 +0000

It just occurred to me that I never actually put up the final, fixed version of the OCS poster. So, ta dah!

Also worth mentioning is the OCS presence on the Create wiki. It comes with a flashy new domain name for OCS: opencolour.org. Eventually, I want to get a more permanent site up at that address, but for now, it's pointing to the wiki, where the future of Open Colour is being discussed.

Describing Colour

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Bob Coons has put up a very nice synopsis on the basics of colour perception. Very readable, very understandable. Link

OCS Research Report V1.0.1

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:12:00 +0000

Version 1.0.1 of the OCS Research Report is now available. Download the pdf.

Revisions in v1.0.1:

Added:
p1. contributor list
p6. "The reverse of this is, of course, also true."
p6. "(including #0099cc, the colour of the OCS logo)"
p7. "As mentioned above, Pantone provides mixing instructions to print professionals. These instructions provide the direction necessary to create any colour in the Pantone range from a set of base colours (these colours include process yellow, process magenta, process cyan, process black, orange, red, blue, yellow, warm red, rubine red, rhodamine red, purple, violet, reflex blue, process blue and black). These instructions are laid out in a similar fashion to paint mixing ratios."
pp7-8. "despite the existence of other viable palettes such as Focoltone, Trumatech, Munsell (the rights to which are currently owned by X-Rite, Pantone's parent company), Toyo, HKS, RAL and so on."
p9. "(a Canadian chain of book stores)"
p13. "is" between the words "involvement" and "what" in paragraph 3
p15. a space between "students," and "use"
p15. "Usability: Even if they wish to try Open Source alternatives, many designers lack the skills required to do so. They may find programs difficult to install, with technical issues they aren't used to dealing with."

Modified:
Formatting changed to minimize excess white space at the tops of some pages.

Removed:
p11. " and the principles behind it" from after "(FLOSS)"

OCS Research Report Versioning Guidelines

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:09:00 +0000

The OCS Research Report is not going to be a static document. Revisions and suggestions are always welcome. (If you have anything that you think needs to be added, email me.) As such, we need a versioning system. Partly so that I won't forget and partly so that it's more widely known, here's the plan: I don't anticipate leaving the 1.somethings any time soon, if ever. So, the syntax will be 1.section added.section revised. In practice, this means that the newest version (coming soon), with changes to the section on colour spaces, will be version 1.0.1. Good?

New Site

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:24:00 +0000

Up and running, at a temporary address, the main OCS website. It's a little bare bones at the moment, but should be getting more content in the near future.

OCS site

OCS Open Source poster round two

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:35:00 +0000

OCS Open Source poster

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 23:06:00 +0000

Four versions of an OCS/Open Source for Designers poster promoting Open Source alternatives to closed industry standards.

OCS Action Plan

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:49:00 +0000

I've worked up a bit of a strategic plan for the future of the Open Colour Standard, based on conclusions from the research report mentioned earlier.

Areas outlined in the action plan: major problems, low-hanging fruit, actions that can be taken to advance the Open Colour Standard and actions to support Open Source for designers.

Download the action plan as a PDF

Style Guide

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:52:00 +0000

New and exciting! A handy, one page version of the OCS style book. Download the PDF or look at the version below.

Research Report: release 1.0

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:00:00 +0000

After yesterday's post of the beta version of this report, it's now time to roll out version 1.0. Changes since the last version include a newly added bibliography and table of contents, changes to the inline citation style and new content added to the section on Open Source and designers.

Download version 1.0 as a PDF

Research Report on Colour, Open Source and Designers

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:59:00 +0000

A taste of the report:

"The purpose of the following research report is to create context for the Open Colour Standard project. To that end, this report discusses issues of colour, commercial and non-commercial colour spaces, the use of colour in industry, the Pantone colour space and the business behind it, Open Source projects, their adoption and the possibility of Open Source design."

Full report, as a PDF

Problems with Open Source Adoption Among Designers

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:11:00 +0000

I've been hunting around, trying to figure out just why it is that more designers don't use Open Source software. I've isolated a few candidates:

Designers are set in their ways: Most designers already know some permutation of the Adobe Creative Suite. Why bother learning something new?
Employability: Creative Suite is taught in design schools, most every job a design grad can hope to get post school will involve Creative Suite. It just doesn't make sense to learn anything but Creative Suite if Creative Suite is what employers install on their computers.
Print shops: Because Creative Suite is the industry standard, print shops take the proprietary Adobe file formats. Sure, you could just send them a .pdf, but what if something goes wrong?
Open Source optics: Most designers see Open Source programs as poor cousins to proprietary equivalents. They view programs like The GIMP as Photoshop clones instead of programs in their own rite. As long as the Creative Suite monopoly exists, it will be quite difficult for Open Source programs to gain traction.

In short, Open Source is faced by a cyclical problem: Everyone learns Creative Suite in school because the whole industry uses Creative Suite. Printers use Creative Suite because their clients do and their clients use it because the printers do. Because Creative Suite is an industry standard, snobbish or blinkered designers continue to perceive it as something hobbyists use. If designers never start using Open Source software, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: Open Source graphics programs will be for hobbyists.

How does this impact Open Colour Standard? Replace the words Creative Suite with PANTONE. Replace Open Source software with Open Colour Standard. Gaining a foothold in such a closed industry is going to be difficult.

OCS style: colour

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:32:00 +0000

OCS blue is #0099cc for web and CMYK 78 24 0 0 for print.

If grey must be used instead of blue, use #7c7c7c (CMYK 0 0 0 51).

Headers and links on the OCS website are always #0099cc.

Logotype, when in colour is black and OCS blue. When in greyscale, it is black and OCS grey.

OCS Collateral Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:28:00 +0000

why collateral?

marketing collateral for OCS needs to be developed in order to raise awareness of the issues behind colour and colour standards
help designers realize what they are buying into
inform designers that they have the power to have options
get designers interested in helping to develop new options
get them thinking about why they use Pantone when they could have something authored by themselves and accessible to everyone

what collateral?

posters for use at design schools, offices and other places where designers congregate
postcards for use at events like conferences where many transient designers are in attendance
website for providing more in depth information on alternatives to Pantone
ads, similar in intent to the posters, for use in design-centric magazines like Print and Azure

where collateral?

anywhere designers can be found in large quantities, in physical space, internet space and media space

how collateral?

target designers where they congregate
engage them with some kind of hook
feed them new information that they may never even have considered before
drive them to find out more
mobilize them, with hopes of creating community around OCS

who collateral?

designers, largely those who deal in print media, but also others
print professionals
those who deal in textiles, plastics, markers, paints and so on...

conclusion
I have some serious market research to do. Who are these people? Where can I find them? Do they have any interest at all in community built systems, or are they just loners content to buy Pantone chip books every year? Can they be harnessed? How much do they already know about colour? Do they have any spare time? Do they know anything at all about Open Source? Would they be interested if they did? Can they be made to care?

OCS style: logo and typography

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:07:00 +0000

The OCS logo, without typography, has a 1:1 aspect ratio, with typography, it becomes 100:79.5.
Logo with type looks like this:
Logo without type looks like this:
Type alone looks like this:
OCS uses FreeSans, bold and all caps for logotype.
OCS uses FreeSans for all non-HTML typography.

Introduction to the OCS style book

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:59:00 +0000

Why does the Open Colour Standard need a book of style guidelines? It needs a defined style for the same reasons any other Open Source project should have one. A style book helps to define and create a unified look in a decentralized project. It helps new community members create on-message collateral and identity elements. It prevents the OCS look from becoming diffuse and meaningless. It prevents the misuse of OCS identity elements. What's more, it answer questions about the OCS look and guidelines.

In decentralized undertakings like Open Source projects, having something to tie contributors together is especially important. Since OCS has no physical culture or ties between community members, it must rely on tools like the style book to create and encourage unity.

Light and Colour

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:23:00 +0000

The human eye has four kinds of sensors: rods, which detect black and white; a cone for red; a cone for green; and a cone for blue. Our perception of colour relies on these sensors.

White light is made up of all the colours of the visible light spectrum. This can be seen when a beam of white light is refracted by a prism. Apparently, Newton had a lot to say about this, as he was the first to prove that white light is made of the rest of the visible light spectrum. More on this once I've had a better look at Opticks. Goethe also had a lot to say about the physics of light and colour perception. Again, more once I've read Theory of Colours.

The Purpose of the Open Colour Standard

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:03:00 +0000

Brief words about the Open Colour Standard: OCS is a union of colour theory and large scale information organization. OCS will be executed within an open source framework.

Open Colour Standard Goals

Create an Open Colour Standard to rival proprietary colour spaces
study colour for commercial and artistic uses in an open and transparent way, within the spirit of FLOSS
educate designers, creators, businesses about the importance and benefits of open standards
grow a community of open source colour developers
take the prohibitive costs out of getting precise colour in print media

The mission of the Open Colour Standard will be to:

educate the populous about colour
democratize the precise use of colour in real world applications
encourage experimentation and development with colour
make colour accessible

New Letterhead, Almost the Same as the Old Letterhead

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:56:00 +0000

On Open Source Organization

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:10:00 +0000

"play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work." (Raymond, 1997)

In his 1998 essay, "Homesteading the Noosphere," Eric Raymond outlines several different management structures used in Open Source projects. These structures are:

sole maintainer
multiple maintainers under one benevolent dictator
democracy with developers as voting members
rotating dictatorship among senior developers

In the Open Source community, the term "benevolent dictator" refers to the leader/overseer of a project. The benevolent dictator effectively acts as a gatekeeper for the project, providing vision and oversight. The most notable example of a benevolent dictator is Linus Torvalds, who safeguards the integrity of the Linux kernel. A maintainer is less managerial and more technical. Instead of dealing with the vision of a project, in models with both dictators and maintainers, maintainers are tasked with responsibility over one section of the project. In a model that has both maintainers and a benevolent dictator, multiple maintainers work under the benevolent dictator at individual tasks with the goal of fulfilling the vision as set out by the benevolent dictator.

Important factors in community building around software development, according to Raymond, are having "something runnable and testable to play with" (1997) to offer your contributors, as well as having a "plausible promise" (1997).

Worth quoting in full, on the topic of what contiributors like to do: "Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment predicts efficiency" (1997).

Pantone Laundry List

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:25:00 +0000

Below is a brief list of products sold by Pantone and what they do.

display calibration software/devices (colorimeters) for getting accurate on-screen colour
spectrophotometers for measuring the wavelengths of light
palette management software for selecting Pantone colours from images, building co-ordinated palettes and managing those palettes
colour chip books for selecting and matching Pantone colours and getting mixing instructions
colour matching electronic thingies for pointing at colour, whereupon the thingie tells you what the nearest pantone equivalent is
digital colour chips same as the colour chip books, except digital
colour chip books for process colour same as standard colour chip books, but for CMYK colours instead of Pantone
colour selector systems for opaque and transparent plastics with cross references to pantone textile and print systems for selecting plastic colours
cotton colour swatch sets for selecting fabric colours
colour forecasts for up to a year in the future, detailing what colour trends will be in upcoming fashion/houseware seasons

Very Preliminary Findings on Commercial Colour

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:49:00 +0000

Pantone: de facto industry standard for colour matching

Does print, textile, plastics, paint, has own line of consumer goods in Pantone colours
Loads of things are specified in Pantone colours: Canadian flag red, colours of plants in patent applications, sciencey things, spot colour in offset printing
Sells chip books that help designers determine what colours will look like when printed, as well as providing ink mixing instructions to printers. The chip books need to be replaced every year to prevent fading. They also happen to be ridiculously expensive.
Has its colour specification built into the Adobe Creative Suite

Not Pantone

Paint manufacturers tend to have their own colour systems.

Canadian Government Standards Board has specifications for paint. I just need to get my hands on a copy of the document.

Individual manufacturers of markers have their own systems (for example, Letraset, which bases its colour system on HSL)

Letterhead & Business Card

noreply@blogger.com (ginger coons) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:41:00 +0000