Swedile in the Classroom #4 - Colour as a Semiotic Mode

Gosh, I wish I had saved my Synesthesia discussion from my last Swedile in the Classroom for this blog posting.

Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen bring up the concept of color ‘grammar’ in their essay “Colour as a semiotic mode: note for a grammar on colour”; the idea that colors, as a mode of imparting information, can be structured and have set rules. And I don’t know if I can buy that. Color is so arbitrary and so personalized; it’s nearly impossible to have a set meaning for any one of them. Even in the essay itself, the authors give contradictory emotive descriptions of just about all, if not every, color they mention. I myself was put off almost initially when they suggested that “red is for danger, green for hope.” While I can agree with the assessment of red, I’ve never once associated green with hope. I’ve associated it with everything from the placidness of nature, due to the environmental conditioning that green goes with nature, to the awesome, exciting action of giant robots, due to the mechas in the series Gurren Lagann being powered with the green effervescence known as “Spiral Power.”

VS.

To assume any one thing about any one color being understood universally, even things that would seem pretty obvious, isn’t feasible, since everyone experiences the world differently. Plus, the social meanings of color changes with the zeitgeist. Take for example the story of Lucky Strike cigarettes.

In the years before World War II, the Lucky Strike cigarette company felt that women were not buying their product, and decided to hire Edward Bernays as a consultant. He told them that the reason women were not buying their cigarettes was because women did not like the color green. At the time, the green was their signature color, and they refused to change it. So instead, Bernays orchestrated an ingenious media campaign, buying up space in newspapers and having fake articles run saying “green is in.” And what happened is he changed the entire fashion world that year, and what’s more, he totally changed the perception of a color.

Colors change meanings in society all the time. Right now, pink denotes “Breast cancer awareness.” For me, it always used to denote girls, specifically children. Growing up, pink was a girl’s color. Now it means something else. And there’s the anti-bullying movement now, too. It denotes that. I just think colors are too personal and arbitrary to be able to come up with any set rules for them.

However, I do agree with the last point in the article, specifically the differences in organization between the ad and the brochure’s color palette (although I wish I could have seen the colors themselves). The colors themselves, I think, were not as important as the way they were contrasted with each other. If you take a sampling of colors and present them one way, people will perceive the message of the colors differently than if they’re organized in another way. I think this is really the only true form of color “grammar” we can hope to reach; not in the colors themselves, as they are too volatile to have a universally agreed-upon meaning, but in the organization of those colors, and how it can steer the reader to reading a text or understanding a message the way the designer wants it to be understood.


- Chris Muise

P.S. – Readers, you should look up Edward Bernays. This is the man responsible for advertising as it is today, and also for things like women smoking and a coup in Guatemala. It’s well worth your time.