Communicating With Color

By Alan J. Porter | Senior Member

My red shoes went viral on the Internet thanks to a photograph taken at the Intelligent Content Conference in Palm Springs back in February. Over the past couple of years, I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with Converse sneakers, and as of today have nine pairs in different colors, usually worn to match whatever shirt or jacket I’m wearing. The red ones always seem to draw comments or, it seems, the occasional photograph.

However, my interest in color goes beyond my choice of sartorial footwear, as I’ve long been interested in the use of color as a design element in communications and storytelling.

Color has always been around us, used by both man and nature as a means to communicate. The bright plumage of a bird or the striped fur of a tiger are not accidents, they are integral parts of animal interaction with each other and their surroundings. The same goes for the human species. We have long used color to communicate with each other and as part of various cultural traditions. So why not use color as part of our technical communication toolbox as well?

Much has been written over the centuries on the use of color and its impact, but it can be argued that no clear, definitive color theory has yet to develop. The use of color remains, in many instances, a subjective topic rather than a measurable, objective one. In part this is due to the fact that, in most cases, we experience color in two different ways:

1. As a mixture of light, called additive color, or
2. As a reflection from a pigment such as paint, inks, or dyes, known as subtractive color.

Throw in variables such as lightness, saturation, and hue, and defining color becomes a complex problem. Nevertheless, during various periods of history, we have developed three base models of color, which can be applied in most circumstances.

The oldest model, and the one we all learn in grade school, was developed in the 18th century and was based on the belief that there were three primary colors—Red, Yellow, and Blue—from which all others could be mixed. This pigment-based color model is known as RGB.

With further study into the behavior of light in the 19th century, the three primary monochromatic light sources were identified as Red, Green, and BlueViolet. In the early 20th century, this RGB model was found to align with the way that the receptors in the back of the retina respond to light.

With the advance of chemical printing and the ability to produce more subtle variants, the primary colors that worked best for printing and photography were identified as Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. In printing, a fourth Key color (usually black) is added and we have the CYMK model.

It used to be that the four-color printing process was a tricky and expensive process needing print layers for each color, and color combination, to produce the desired results. The layers also had to be correctly aligned for each of the four passes of the printing press. Given those restraints, it was perhaps inevitable that most technical manuals were produced using a much cheaper black-and-white process.

However, printing technology has changed in recent decades and color printing is very close to black and white in cost. I’m betting that you have a color printer at home that can produce photographic-quality prints.

Yet we still stick to boring black-and-white tech manuals, ignoring a vital method of communication that is easily understood on an almost instinctual level. While there may still be an argument for not using color in print instructions (although I think it’s becoming a less tenable one), the increase in electronic delivery platforms and new standards such as eBooks, interactive technical manuals, and service centers make the move to color inevitable.

Of course, adding color to your deliverables isn’t as simple as just picking a few crayons from the box and coloring between the lines. The use of color takes a lot of thought and a new set of skills. In fact, an individual’s color-theory knowledge and experience can make a big impact. As an example, in my other writing job as a comics writer, I hadn’t really taken too much notice of the use of color beyond the obvious one of making sure the characters and locations were colored consistently. Then, on one title I was writing, we had a switch of colorist and she colored a thunderstorm story page in such a way that it almost jumped off the page. From that point on, she became as much a part of the storytelling team as myself or the artist. I started to write scenes where the use of color became an essential part of the storytelling experience because I knew that this particular colorist would be able to produce the desired results. And it’s worth noting that in the comics industry, “colorist” is its own distinct profession.

Think about the colors you see around you everyday and how they are used. Red is often used for “stop” or “danger,” green for “go,” etc. Your company probably already has some color standards overseen by the marketing group on how the company colors can be used. Think about how they can be incorporated into your technical documentation. Even take a look at the colors used in the product you are writing about. How can they be used?

One of my favorite examples of documentation is sitting on the shelf in my office—a slim volume that came with the wireless router I installed in my house. This documentation is one of the best uses of color coordination between product and technical communication I have come across to date. The depiction of the wires used to connect the router to the Internet and a computer are shown in different colors, and the relevant connection ports on the back of the router are coded with matching color surrounds. In the documentation, each time a specific wire or port is mentioned, not only is the color of the wire mentioned, but it is printed in the appropriate color, too. So the words “blue wire” are printed in blue, the words “red wire” are printed in red, etc. The accompanying illustrations also show the appropriate wires and ports in the correct colors. The document designers went a step further by using the color-coding as a format and visual element in the document layout, too. The installation of each cable is treated as a separate section with section headings, and a side thumb tab is also printed in the appropriate color. It is a simple yet very effective example of color applied across the product and supporting documentation.

Another great example of matching product color in supporting documentation is with the assembly instructions you find in a Lego building block kit.

As well as corporate color themes and physical product color combinations, you may find that the industry you are working in also has, or is developing, its own set of color standards. For instance, the Society of Automotive Engineers is developing a graphical vocabulary for use with animations and color illustrations in electronic tools and delivery platforms. Among the items under consideration are predefined colors to indicate various parts of an animation step, such as:

• the focus object
• the tool(s) being used
• identifying the sequence of parts being removed
• a secondary part affected by work on the focus object

The military S1000D specification has similarly defined a set of 11 different colors for use in Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETM).

A few other things you need to consider with the use of color go beyond design and presentation, and include cultural and environmental considerations of where your end customers actually use your documentation.

Even if you have a nice electronic manual, there’s a good chance that a field service technician is going to want to print out a page with an illustration and some instructions on it, and there’s a better than even chance he won’t have a nice color printer in his truck or workshop, so make sure that your color illustrations are readable when printed in black and white or grayscale. If this use case is something that your customers will experience, you may want to consider adding symbols and icons to “double signal” the items you were using color to differentiate. (I covered the use of symbols and icons in the December 2010 issue of Intercom.)

As I mentioned earlier, humans have been using color to communicate within our various cultures for millennia. However, when delivering information to today’s global marketplace, you need to be aware that the interpretation of colors can be different across cultural boundaries.

While red may mean “danger” to an Anglo-American audience, it’s a sign of celebration in China; symbolizes “purity” in India; is the color of mourning in South Africa; and has historical overtones in Russia that are perhaps best avoided. Oh, and don’t use a clipart photo of a man wearing a green hat if you are presenting to someone from China—that’s a sign that the wife of the man in the photo is cheating on him.

Even within your own culture, the interpretation of colors can change. Pink for a girl, blue for a boy—it’s obvious, isn’t it? Only since 1940; before that it was the other way around, pink for boys and blue for girls. In fact, any gender-specific colors were unknown before the 1910s.

You can’t mention the idea of using color in technical information without someone raising the issue of colorblindness. It is a factor to be considered, depending on your audience. Colorblindness means that instead of the normal 100+ colors that a typical person can differentiate between, they can only process a palette of around 20 colors. Colorblindess comes in three types: protan (less sensitive to red light), deutan (the most common, less sensitive to a red-green combination), and tritan (problems with blue-yellow). Colorblindness is more common in men, affecting around 8% of the male population. Less than 0.5% of women exhibit any form of colorblindness.

People can go for years without realizing they are colorblind. For instance, my father-in-law didn’t know he was colorblind until he was 70 years old. We discovered it when he was playing Uno, the color-matching card game, with my daughters. Yet he had spent his whole career building aircraft engines, where color recognition of wiring is a major part of the job. Thankfully, he’d never made a color-related mistake; his view of “red” is just different from most peoples’. In fact, who’s to say that the way I perceive “red” is the same as the way you perceive it, even if we both have supposedly normal eyesight?

In some instances, colorblindness can be an asset. People who are used to working with a reduced color palette are often much better at distinguishing subtle differences in various hues of color than a person with a full color spectrum.

As with the black-and-white printing solution, if you feel that colorblindess may impact the effectiveness of the your documentation in your user community, consider adding symbols to reinforce the message you want to convey with the added color.

Adding color can be a great asset to your technical information, but it needs to be done with thought and care. It deserves as much attention as any other part of the information architecture and design, and should be a considered part of any content strategy.

Used correctly, color can make your information more effective and increase user satisfaction.

Alan J. Porter is a principal consultant at PTC where he leads their Service Lifecycle Management practice. He is also the founder of 4Js Group, a content strategy consulting company, as well as a frequent speaker and writer on many aspects of content strategy and development. His latest book, The Content Pool (XML Press) discusses how companies can leverage their greatest hidden asset—their content. Follow Alan on Twitter @alanjporter or @4JsGroup or via his Content Pool blog: http://thecontentpool.com.