The Colours We Remember

Last week I found myself staring at six coloured squares on a computer screen.

I was trying to choose a small colour palette for a couple of coordinating patterns I was working on. It became as much about learning as it was about designing.

Quilters become familiar with colour quite quickly. In fact, we often learn to look beyond colour itself, paying more attention to value - how light or dark a fabric appears.

Value is the secret sauce for a patchwork block such that becomes ‘top of the pops’ or fails to enter the charts at all.

Many quilters are intuitively very good at selecting colour but I would hazard a guess that many, like me, struggle with something rather less tangible.

Why can two almost identical blues feel so completely different?

A couple of weeks ago I received a newsletter from surface pattern designer Telva Chase where she recounted a story of a client asking if she could make a particular blue “feel more like a hug.”

It made me smile. It seemed a comically odd request.

And yet...

sitting there with my own palette of colours, it seemed very relatable.

If asked, I'm sure most of us could name at least ten different blues. But how many of us could name a blue that feels like a hug?

Not too long ago I watched a video about Dentōshoku, you can watch here if you like to. I can recommend it.

Dentōshoku is a traditional Japanese system describing more than a thousand colours. Rooted in nature, they appear throughout classical literature, textiles, woodblock prints and art. Their names are more than descriptions; they carry history, seasonality and cultural memory.

‘Sky Blue’ becomes Mizu-iro - ‘the colour of water’. Instead of looking up to describe the sky, the name invites us to look down into a clear, shallow stream. The colour now has place, memory and feeling.

By contrast to this poetic and culturally reverent system we have Pantone. Another lexicon of colour that describes colour in numbers.

Sky Blue, for example is Pantone 14-4318

Pantone began in 1963 from the practical needs of printers and designers. It standardises colour into a formula of chemical pigments such that a specific blue is exactly the same whether it is printed on England or New England.

Recogised as an international language for colour, Pantone reaches into fashion, interiors, graphic design and manufacturing. It’s reach is so deep infact, that designers wanting to print a Dentōshoku colour can find a Pantone match - even if it does strip away the very essence of it’s meaning. Something Pantone set to rectify in the late 1990’s.

Realizing they had stripped colour of its emotional soul they founded the Pantone Colour Institute and launched the offical colour of the year program in 1999. The colour they selected - Cerulean Blue 15-4020 - was picked to inspire emotional calm, peace and limitlessness against a backdrop of Y2K anxiety for a digital future.

Every December, the announcement of Pantone's Colour of the Year is eagerly awaited, sparking discussion and influencing colour trends around the world.

Different histories.

Different purposes.

One grew from poetry, nature and tradition.

The other from chemistry, printing presses and manufacturing.

Both eventually arrived at the same place.

A few mornings ago I stood at my kitchen window here in Hampshire watching the sky slowly lighten before sunrise.

I couldn’t tell you what that colour is called.

But I know exactly how it made me feel.

Perhaps that’s why I spent so long looking at six coloured squares on a computer screen.

I wasn’t trying to choose a colour.

I was trying to choose how I wanted the design to feel.

Because colours are more than something we see. They’re quiet little containers for places we’ve been, moments we’ve lived and emotions we’ve almost forgotten.