Color and Visceral App Design

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Jeff Yurek

Visceral refers to the gut, rather than the mind. Our brain may try to talk us out of jumping off a cliff, but as soon as we take that first step into the void, our guts take over. We respond with a rush of emotion and we can’t help but scream from terror or euphoria. It’s a purely visceral reaction. [...]

So here’s my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before.

That’s Rob Foster, co-founder of Mysterious Trousers, defining his theory about the importance of visceral elements in application design. The whole piece is well worth reading, especially if you are interested in design or have ever wondered just why Angry Birds is so unbelievably addictive.

In the quote above Rob is talking about the power of little kinetic events in applications like the bounce you get when scrolling to the bottom of a page on the iPhone or the satisfying little “pop” noise you hear when creating a new task in Clear. His point is well made, getting the details of these visceral elements right can clearly take an app from just useful to a truly engaging and even addictive experience for users.

While Rob’s piece focused on the impact of animation and sound, I wondered how color might factor into visceral application design.

Color choice is not just about beautiful graphics- it can also have a powerful physiological effect on us. We have a measurable response to aggressive colors like red, which may even cause a spike in testosterone levels. In fact, recent studies suggest that that the color of a uniform can affect the outcome of an Olympic wrestling match and onscreen colors can even influence how much you pay for something on eBay.

As mobile display technology improves, with more lifelike color and wider dynamic range, application designers may find that color becomes an even more powerful tool to elicit visceral responses from users.

Color of the year for 2013 falls outside sRGB gamut

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Pantone recently announced their color of the year for 2013, a deep shade of emerald green that they call “Emerald 17-5641.” It’s a great color but there’s a catch- most displays cannot accurately show it.

Based on data from Pantone’s website, I was able to plot the color in CIE 1931 (xy). As you can see in the chart below, Pantone’s color is well outside the sRGB/rec.709 color gamut standard used by most HDTVs, the new iPad/iPhone and many desktop monitors. These devices will be stuck showing a version of Pantone’s emerald green that’s less saturated and probably a bit more yellow than the real thing.

This is a perfect example of a popular real-world color that falls outside of the sRGB/rec.709 gamut. Unless you have a monitor that’s able to show wider color gamuts, like the DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB standards, you are missing out on a great color.

So you bought a 4K TV, now where is the 4K content?

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Content is king. One of the biggest challenges for emerging display technology is content availability. Whether it’s 3D, 4K or wide color gamut, these new features simply aren’t worth much without access lots of great, optimized content.

As new 4K TV’s begin hitting store shelves this year, they are entering a content vacuum.

Standards bodies like the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are still working out the precise definition of marketing terms like Ultra High Definition TV (UHDTV). Proposed standards could include support for eight million pixel resolution, extremely wide color gamut and 3D content. But, today, there is almost no content out there that takes full advantage of all of the exciting capabilities of the new sets.

And, unlike the transition to HDTV, there’s no government-mandated switch on the horizon to force broadcasters to get on board.

At least one set-maker is taking it upon themselves to solve this problem by delivering both the 4K content and hardware. Sony announced last week that it will loan a 4K Ultra HD video player loaded with UHD content to buyers of their new 84” UHD television. The selection of 4K content on this player is fairly limited for now, but as more titles are released, this approach could help drive adoption of high resolution and wide color gamut formats. I wouldn’t be surprised if other set makers started following suit, though Sony does have an inherent advantage, owning a movie studio.

Shopping for a tablet this holiday season? Don’t forget to look at color performance

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

If you have been researching the perfect tablet to give to a loved one this holiday season, you’ve probably read a lot about display quality. Tablet display size, resolution and aspect ratio have been discussed at length this year, which is really no surprise, since the quality of the display has the biggest impact on how we enjoy content on these devices.

What is surprising though is that color performance, one of the biggest differentiators among the current crop of tablet displays, has been largely glossed over by the mainstream gadget press.

The Verge’s tablet comparison tool, for example, gives great info about pixel density, aspect ratio and touch capabilities, but color performance is nowhere to be found:

Color is being ignored in spite of the fact that there are tremendous differences in the color performance of each of these devices that directly impact the consumer experience on each.

So why are we overlooking a feature that, unlike many of the features we focus on these days, presents a real difference between devices? I see a couple reasons. First and foremost, thanks to Apple’s marketing of the Retina display, pixels-per-inch has become the spec du jour in today’s device wars. Device makers are focusing their marketing efforts on pixel count above anything else.

Aside from current trends, I believe there’s also a macro reason to why color has been left out: color performance is just hard to compare. There is no universally accepted spec that can sum up color performance across devices.

Take the three popular tablets above. We could add a “color gamut” row to the chart, measuring against sRGB, which would look like this:

From this information, a shopper could gather that the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD have about the same color performance and both outdo the iPad mini. That is an accurate assessment, but it’s not the whole story. If we look at those color gamuts plotted in CIE 1976, some important nuances become apparent.

By measuring the percent of sRGB, we know how much of that overall color standard the device can reproduce. However, displays usually produce more of one color than another and that information is completely lost with this measurement. The Nexus and Kindle have significantly deeper blue than the iPad mini, most likely due to a narrower blue color filter like the one found in the third and fourth generation iPad. This accounts for most of the difference in sRGB coverage between the iPad mini and the other two devices.

Take a look at the other two primaries and it gets more interesting. In the image on the right that zooms in on green, we see that the Kindle Fire has the deepest green of the three, followed by the iPad mini and the Nexus.

For reds, though, it’s different again, with the Nexus having the deepest reds followed by Kindle and then iPad.

If we ever want to make color performance a real differentiator in consumer choice, we need to develop a new universal standard to easily compare color across devices, taking into account all of these nuances.

Color is a complex story to tell, but small differences in color performance are just as noticeable to consumers as pixel density in everyday use. Next time you find yourself at a retailer who carries all three devices, try googling test patterns and look at the differences. You might be surprised.

iPad Content Creation gets more Colorful with FiftyThree’s Paper app

Posted on November 8, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

App developer FiftyThree recently updated one of my favorite creativity apps for iOS, Paper, with an impressive new color-related feature. If you are not familiar with Paper, it’s a sketchbook app capable of making the work of even non-artists like me look gallery worthy with an intuitive and responsive interface.

The new feature, which FiftyThree calls “the biggest leap forward in color controls in the past 40 years,” is a color mixer that allows you to create a wide array of colors within the app just as you would in real life. They say they put a lot of time and effort into making the new mixer feel natural. The Paper color mixer works just like finger painting as a kid, mixing yellow and blue in the Paper app mixer produces green.

The new color mixer, shown at the bottom of this screenshot, lets you mix multiple colors to achieve a much wider palette in the new version of Paper.

This is a great feature that expands the content creation capabilities of an already exceptional app. But, as great as this app is, it’s still limited by the color capability of the device it’s installed on. Even the latest iPad, which can produce 100% of the sRGB color gamut, still only shows about 1/3 of the visible color spectrum.

The experience you will have mixing and creating colors on today’s tablets just will not be nearly as dynamic or visceral as making a physical painting. Not until better, wide color gamut technology is adopted in displays will the digital color experience match the stunning world of color we live in.

How does ink thickness change the appearance of printed color?

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

We typically focus on color as it relates to displays here at dot-color, but I came across a fascinating post about color in the print industry from John the Math Guy that I had to share. In this post, John takes a close look at how ink looks at different thicknesses and uncovers the reasons for some seemingly unconventional color-naming habits in the print industry.

What happens when we double the amount of ink on the paper? …it would seem that the thick layer of magenta is a lot closer to red. The plot below shows the actual spectra of two magenta patches, one at a larger ink film thickness than the other. The plot leads one to the same impression – that a thick layer of magenta is closer to red in hue than a thin layer.

Chart shows different spectrums of thick (red line) and thin (blue line) layers of magenta ink.

Read the whole thing here: http://johnthemathguy.blogspot.com/2012/09/why-does-my-cyan-have-blues.html

Updated: How does the iPhone 5’s color saturation measure up against Apple’s claims?

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Commenter William thankfully double checked our math and we’ve corrected a small error in our % NTSC calculation.

We finally got our hands on an iPhone 5 yesterday. I tried asking Siri if she really has 44% more color saturation but she wouldn’t give up the goods, so I went with plan B and aimed our PR-655 spectroradiometer at the phone to find out just how impressive the screen really is. A lot has already been written about this display, but not much empirical evidence has been published about the color performance. How does the screen actually stack up to the marketing claims?

In short, Apple did an exceptional job improving color saturation and display quality in general, but the unit we measured just missed the 44% more color saturation claim.

Measuring Up

The iPhone 5 has significantly more color saturation than the 4S.

The 44% more color claim for the iPhone 5 is the same claim Apple made for the new iPad. As with the iPad, increasing the color performance of the iPhone 4S by 44% of NTSC 1953 gamut, measured using the CIE 1931 color space, would result in color saturation matching the sRGB color standard. Using these standards as the goal posts, we measured the iPhone 5 at 70% of NTSC 1953 in CIE 1931, a 39% increase from the iPhone 4S, which measured at 50%. That’s 5% less of an improvement than Apple’s 44% claim and just 99% of sRGB (measured against the sRGB primaries).

While 5% less might seem like a big deal, getting to 99% of sRGB is a major feat and will result in tremendously noticeable color improvement in the phone. Additionally, color filters are notoriously difficult to manufacture. Slight variances in performance like this are common and most likely outside the range of a just noticeable difference for the average person.

If you want to know more about NTSC, CIE and sRGB, and why we are using standards from the 1930s, I have written extensively about this issue in the past.

How did they do it?

Much like they did with the new iPad, Apple significantly improved the color filter performance^† of the iPhone 5. Based on our experience, this type of improvement typically means that the display requires 20-30% more power to operate at the same brightness. Considering that the display is already a major source battery drain on the phone, this further underscores the engineering effort Apple made to keep battery life about the same as the 4S.

Let’s take a quick look at the changes in each of the red, green and blue color filters, starting with white, which is all three filters turned on:

Looking at the white spectrum of the iPhone 5, we see that the new color filters are very similar to those of the new iPad. Compared to the 4S, the peaks are slightly narrower, which improves color purity. In order to meet sRGB, they also moved to deeper reds and blues.

As with the new iPad, the biggest difference between the 4S and the 5 is in blue. Apple moved the peak to a deeper blue but, more importantly, they narrowed the filter so less green light leaks through. The green leakage causes blue to look a bit “aqua” on the 4S.

Retinal neuroscientist Bryan Jones looked at both displays under his stereo microscope earlier this week. His close-up shots really show off the difference in blue filters.

Apple again chose a slightly deeper wavelength of green which is less yellow and eliminated some of the blue leakage that had been muddying the green on the 4S.

The change here is subtle but as with the other filters, the peak is narrower, deeper in the red and leakage is reduced. One difference worth noting is that, while we are seeing less peak leakage in the red filter, there had been relatively broadband leakage across yellow, green and into blue that has been largely eliminated.

Conclusion

In all, it’s an exceptionally well-calibrated and accurate display for any kind of device, especially a smartphone. Apple has gone to great lengths to design a screen that brings the vibrancy of sRGB to the palm of your hand.
^† If you are not familiar with color filters or the inner-workings of LCDs in general this great live teardown by Bill Hammack is well worth watching: http://youtu.be/jiejNAUwcQ8

Seeing red: can color change your spending habits?

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Color can have a powerful physiological effect on us. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever been wowed by a Monet or a Rothko. But color can affect us in ways you never imagined. Recent studies suggest that that the color of a uniform can affect the outcome of an Olympic wrestling match and onscreen colors can influence how much you pay for something on eBay.

In one study, researchers found that Olympic wrestlers wearing red won as much as 60% of the time, even against evenly matched opponents (who wore a different color).

US Wrestler Jake Varner (red) on his way to defeating Valerie Andriisteve of Ukraine in the 96-kg freestyle wrestling gold match in London. Credit: The ASSOCIATED PRESS

Similarly, in a Journal of Consumer Research study on the impact of color on consumers who buy items on auction sites like eBay, authors Rajesh Bagchi and Amar Cheema found that “red background color induces aggression through a feeling of arousal and it increases aggression relative to blue or gray backgrounds. This causes individuals to make higher bids in auctions but lower offers in negotiations.”

Why? The exact mechanism remains a mystery but researchers see some evidence that aggressive colors like red may actually cause a spike in testosterone levels.

I find it particularly fascinating that color choice did not specifically correlate to the price someone paid for an item. Instead, the colors drove more or less aggressive behavior, which lead participants to either seek the best deal possible against a salesperson or to beat out competing bids in an auction.

It got me wondering how retailers might be using color to influence purchasing. A quick survey of some popular online shopping destinations yielded potentially interesting results. Since product background is not always in the control of the retailer, I looked at the “add to cart” areas of three popular online retailers: Apple, Amazon and eBay.

All three employ a lot of blue, a calming color, in their ‘add to cart’ areas. Apple uses a shade of green, another calming color, for the “add to cart” button. Amazon lists the price in a dark red, while Apple uses a lighter shade to accentuate free shipping.

Next time you find yourself shopping either online or brick and mortar, take note of the colors around you – you may be surprised by how far your environment is being manipulated to get you to pay more.

Color Space Confusion

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

For many who are new to the world of display measurement, the prevalence of two distinct, but often-interchanged color spaces can be a source of confusion. Since my recent post about the color performance of Apple’s new iPad, a number of people have asked about this topic, so I thought it would be worth a closer look.

In the world of displays and color images, there exists a variety of separate standards for mapping color, CIE 1931 and CIE 1976 being the most popular among them. Despite its age, CIE 1931, named for the year of its adoption, remains a well-worn and familiar shorthand throughout the display industry. As a marketer of high color gamut display components, I can tell you from firsthand experience that CIE 1931 is the primary language of our customers. When a customer tells me that their current display “can do 72% of NTSC,” they implicitly mean 72% of NTSC 1953 color gamut as mapped against CIE 1931.

However, from the SID International Committee for Display Metrology’s (ICDM) recent, authoritative Display Measurement Standard:

“…we strongly encourage people to abandon the use of the 1931 CIE color diagram for determining the color gamut… The 1976 CIE (u’,v’) color diagram should be used instead. Unfortunately, many continue to use the (x,y) chromaticity values and the 1931 diagram for gamut areas.”

So why are there two standards, and why are we trying to declare one of them obsolete? Let me explain.

What is a color space?

First, a little background on color spaces and how they work.

While there are a number of different types of color spaces, we are specifically interested in chromaticity diagrams, which only measure color quality, independent of other factors like luminance. A color space is a uniform representation of visible light. It maps the all of the colors visible to the human eye onto an x-y grid and assigns them measureable values. This allows us to make uniform measurements and comparisons between colors, and offers certainty that images look the same from display to display when used to create color gamut standards.

In 1931, the Commission internationale de l’éclairage or CIE (International Commission on Illumination in English) defined the most commonly used color space. Here’s a look at the anatomy of the CIE 1931 color space:

What makes a good color space?

An effective color space should map with reasonable accuracy and consistancy to the human perception of color. Content creators want to be sure that the color they see on their display is the same color you see on your display.

This is where the CIE 1931 standard falls apart. Based on the work of David MacAdam in the 1940’s, we learn that the variance in percieved color, when mapped in the CIE 1931 color space, is not linear from color to color. In other words, if you show a group of people the same green, then map what they see against the CIE 1931 color space, they will report seeing a wide decprepancy of different hues of green. However, if you show the same group a blue image, there will be much more agreement on what color blue they are seeing. This uneveness creates problems when trying to make uniform measurements with CIE 1931.

The result of MacAdam’s work is visualized by the MacAdam Elipses. Each elipse represents the range of colors respondents reported seeing when shown a single color, which was the dot in the center of each elipse:

A better standard

It was not until 1976 that the CIE was able to settle on a significantly more linear color space. If we reproduce MacAdam’s work using the new standard, variations in percieve color are minimalized and the MacAdam’s Elipses mapped on a 1976 CIE diagram appear much more evenly sized and circular, as opposed to oblong. This makes color comparisons using CIE 1976 significantly more meaningful.

The difference of the CIE 1976 color space, particularly in blue and green, is immediately apparent. As an example, lets look at the color gamut measurements of the iPad 2 and new iPad we used in an earlier article. Both charts do a reasonably good job of conveying the new iPad’s increased gamut coverage at all three primaries. But, the 1976 chart captures the dramatic perceptual difference in blue (from aqua to deep blue) that you actually see when looking at the displays side by side:

The increased gamut of the new iPad is worth testing. Next time you find yourself in an Apple store, grab an iPad 2, hold it alongside a new iPad, Google up a color bar image and see the difference for yourself.

So, why do we still use CIE 1931 at all? The only real answer is that old habits die hard. The industry has relied on CIE 1931 since its inception, and change is coming slowly.

Fortunately, CIE 1931’s grip is loosening over time. The ICDM’s new measurement standard should eventually force all remaining stragglers to switch over to the more accurate 1976 standard. Until then, you can familiarize yourself with a decent color space conversion calculator, such as the handy converter we built just for this purpose:

Is creativity the next killer mobile app?

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Jeff Yurek

Since the debut of the iPad in 2010, tablets have become the ultimate content consumption device, but many still to wonder if they’ll ever be capable of replacing notebooks for portable content creation.

While tablets may never truly replace notebooks for all of our content creation needs, especially typing intensive ones, a new crop of apps for iOS and Android are certainly making a case for it.

A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app for the iPad from @FiftyThree

(via Brian Taylor from CandyKiller: A little doodle made with the glorious new #Paper app)

Recent creative apps like Paper by fiftythree, Adobe’s Photoshop Touch and Apple’s iPhoto for iOS have just started to scratch the surface of the creative capabilities of powerful mobile devices. These apps show us that mobile creativity, when done right, can harness the unique properties of a touchscreen handheld device to offer new capabilities that a laptop cannot duplicate. Drawing with a stylus in Paper, for example, feels remarkably precise and expressive because of a neat gesture trick- the speed of your pen controls the thickness of the line. Similarly, in Photoshop Touch and iPhoto, editing your photos by actually putting your hands on them, while less precise than a keyboard and mouse, can be a revelation for broad stroke tasks like blending two images.

Tablets clearly have the processing power, the battery life and display resolution necessary to become serious creative tools, but there’s one thing missing: color. Creative professionals normally work on displays capable of showing a range of colors that is as much as 60% wider than even the latest “high color saturation” iPad. Artists need to see the content they are creating in the same vibrant colors they see in the real world. Improving the color performance on mobile devices will make tablets truly worthy of a place in any creative professional’s regular workflow.

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