Think about all of the colors that you have seen today. Now, try to imagine that each of those colors was reduced to a pixel, with the number of pixels of each color corresponding to the amount of that color that you saw. What would that look like? Depending on what season it is, what part of the world you live in, and countless other factors, you would probably end up with some wild combination of greens and blues and grays and browns, undoubtedly with healthy amounts of other colors also represented. It may be difficult to find a pattern in this initial mix, but what happens when that balance of colors slowly starts to shift?
Think, for example, of a sky that transitions from overcast to clear blue. At first, you simply go about your business, never thinking twice about that particular day’s color palette. As the clouds start to clear, you may not notice overtly, but perhaps on some level you start to feel it affect your thought process, or your mood. Eventually the overwhelming purity of the blue demands your attention, and you wonder how you could have ever missed it in the first place.
A color is typically described based on three main components. Hue refers to the families of colors that we refer to with names like yellow and purple. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, with black and white representing the extremes. Chroma is the intensity or purity of the color, and is what eventually grabs your attention on that beautifully sunny day as all of the diluting pixels fade from prominence. That’s what should be celebrated. People are constantly surrounded by the fabulously interesting and the impossibly exquisite, but we sometimes forget to notice. And it’s worth noticing. By embracing environments in which the interesting and exquisite can thrive in their purest form, we can all remember to notice just a little more often.
