Designblog

Maria Blaisse's explorations of form and matter inspire new visions of symbiosis with our surroundings.

Slow design is a continuing inspiration to the Designblog program. If you slow down and take a minute you will see that there are many entries linking it to interesting “projects” done in the past & inspiring work related to the ideas of slow design. Use the ‘slowdesign’, slowlab’, ‘slowme’ tags, you can easily find them in the pink ‘tag-bar’.

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post suggested by Elisa van Joolen

No better way to welcome the students back on the academy after their X-mass holidays. With the end-years fireworks still in mind our color circles accentuated the snowy white carpet of this wintery month

Thanks to the excellent cooperation of the Silkscreen department, printing and routinely sticking the posters to the billboard, so we could enjoy the colorful results of one of the Foundation year’s student latest projects.

These circles were part of a project initiated bij Henk Groenendijk and Matthias Kreuzer as a cooperation between the Design and Design Research classes.
An amount of randomly selected color-sytems were distributed among the student after which they researched substantive backgrounds and the possibilities to base a work on that. The objectivity of science (subjective as the sometimes seemed) was used as an impartial starting point. Parallel to that process a color was determined representing the project or an element of the research. This monochrome color was printed in small print run using silkscreen printing technique. Interaction between research and the creative process is documented on Designblog under the “On-Colour-Project” project

For the Open-Day Hansje van Ooijen (chair) composed here own subjective variant, as a backdrop for the Foundation Year’s Open-Day meeting place.

Researchers / editors: Group B students
Initiators / guides: Matthias Kreutzer and Henk Groenendijk
printing / posting: Harmen Liemburg and Kees Maas

What I understand about Ewald Hering is not a vast amount, it’s pretty narrow. I’m no Physiologist as he was but I will try to elaborate on his theory of Color Opponency, which is the idea that the receptors in our eye that make seeing colors possible are capable of taking in two colors at a time and that to each color there is a reaction. When looking at the two colors at the same time, or next to each other, it has contradictory experiences. This creates a kind of optical illusion where the colors seem to glow. Just like when you look at a black dot on a white background then look away you keep seeing the glow of the dot you stared at. This is that same glow. There are many optical illusions that use this formula.

The opposing colors he was talking about were Blue to Yellow (and vice versa), Green to Red and Black to White.
Anytime these colors are put up next to each other, without any intervening colors, it becomes difficult to look precisely at the border between them.

I understood why this combination of two opposing colors creates this illusion.
So my plan was to combine the colors and create an illusion that had its effect within the colors.
First I started with little prototypes with examples of existing optical illusions, but with the opposing colors, since I had discovered that Hering himself had created an optical illusion, namely the Hering Illusion.

Goodness gracious, is there anything Mr. Hering didn't do?

I found two other optical illusions that were of almost the same design as that of Hering’s and combined the colors with the design of the illusions.

It was too distracting, the optical illusions, so I removed these and tried a simple design; a red square within a green background and the opposite of that; a red background with a green square in the middle.
It felt more honest to the colors, rather than taking something that was already meant as an optical illusion and decorating it, so to say.

I liked the prototypes but they were, after all, prototypes.
So I set off to make three big paintings with a color combination of two each just like the ones I had made before.
The optical illusion worked, halfway through the second one, blue and yellow, I had to wear my sunglasses because I started to get a massive headache.

It was funny how the color scheme, blue & yellow, green & blue and white & black are usually set up together. I finally understood why; it was this subliminal optic effect which makes you either love it or hate it.

Not only that, this might be the very reason some people hate Christmas. Eureka!

I had to pat myself on the back for that one.

What I’m interested in researching further after this project is to see which secondary colors have this same effect with each other.
However I don’t want to limit my research to painting, I want to check if the same rule applies with objects in backgrounds with opposing colors.
I’ll try this with myself wearing a red t-shirt and standing in front of a green wall. The opposite as well, green shirt to a red wall. This I’ll do with all the color combinations and if my calculations are correct I should be able to blind you when you see me.

I started noticing that this same optical illusion not only works with these colors, but that it happens with other ones as well. Colors like purple in combination to green, for example, has a similar effect. However I don’t have the specific formulas to the secondary colors, so I won’t elaborate.

As an ending to the Ewald Hering project we silk screened one color each in reflection to our color theory. I chose the brightest neon pink I could find

(Thank God for Magenta, am I right?)