For the Love of Color
What’s not to love! Color lights up our lives. It moves us both literally and figuratively. Color signals when to stop and when to go. Color affects our moods, purchasing decisions and sense of style.
Many of us take color for granted. We have favorite colors yet may not know why. In different cultures we may be clueless why we react viscerally to certain colors.
At the recent Gmund Colors Tour across the US, Envelopments was honored to come along to share our love of color and why it’s so important to our company and customers.
One of the first things I did when we knew we were going to present on the tour was to gather my team for a brainstorming session. We wanted to create a special project to share with the audience. Since we do a lot of talking and writing about color, it was determined to produce a beautiful booklet called “Color Stories” utilizing the new Gmund Colors line.
Color was and still is one of the cornerstones of our mission at Envelopments. We founded our company in 1995 on the unfulfilled niche of providing a designer’s palette of the best, most saturated colors of card stocks and papers available from the best paper mills around the world.
We have always loved the amazing variety of products created at the Gmund paper mill. When their color system was announced we knew it would be a perfect fit into our system of converted products for creating custom invitations, announcements and communiques.
Gmund approached their new “Colors” line with a systemic rather than accidental approach. They relied on a variety of current trends, scientific color theories and research on the human brain’s functional ability to recognize colors.
In preparing for the tour and to fulfill my curiosity, I followed the history of humanity’s relationship with color. A blending of art and science has evolved since Issac Newton started a series of experiments with sunlight and prisms in the 1660s.
If you want to explore the colorful journey humans have taken I would highly recommend the Smithsonian Museum’s exhibit “Color in a new Light” connecting the dots between science, history, art and culture. Fortunately this exhibit is also online for all of us to experience.
Recently I went to a Virtual Reality Expo and spoke with Liminal-VR who was presenting a new study of color and how it relates to our psychological state of being. This was fascinating, because in VR you have to create each and every color virtually and if you miss the mark you could have a very adverse effect on the viewer.
The story of color is still evolving, being researched, applied, tested and utilized in new ways to color our world.
I’m just really glad that I’m not colorblind…but even then there are new glasses that can fix that!
Envelopments “Color Story” booklet production notes:
Design and Photography: Ramon Gomez, Envelopments Creative Director
Text: Deborah Hefter, Envelopments Co-founder and Designer
Card Stocks: Gmund Colors as indicated on each page in booklet
Printing: Envelopments digital CYMK, Gold, Silver and White
Design Software: Envelopments Extension for Adobe Creative Cloud Illustrator