Reading time: 1:10min | We are held hostage by ideologies and conventions that keep down our creativity. Good for political strongmen.
In the end, many things are taken more seriously than one might think and thus are political. And so are colours, always have been. Red is to the royalty (or to those who feel majestic), police wear blue, and green is the hunter’s and soldier’s colour, such as pink is only for girls – no excuses, please follow the protocol.
In an increasingly authoritarian world, it is more important than ever to rethink our relationship to colour and try to free ourselves from ideologies and conventions of colour design. We should not categorise them unnecessarily, but understand them as a personal, individual space of experience — preferably in interaction with our other senses.
Evidently, our colour reception depends much on culture and psychology, and less so on theories and restrictive opinions of our peers. But reception will not lead to a consistent and independent creation that follows our senses if society stands in the way. That is why I’ve been thinking about colour more than ever, and that’s why I felt the time ripe for rethinking the whole thing and coming forward with a solution.
And that’s it what I came up with this: there are only two kinds of colours, interacting freely. Some colours affect us inevitably, and there are colours we hardly pay attention to.
The first I call signal colours (what wonder) and the latter consumption colours. From there, I wrote down my findings and, to give it a catchy name, I called this simple phenomenon the cognitive colour theory. In its core, the cognitive colour theory is a declaration of love to the open society because we individual humans should be the measure of our creativity and not authorities of any kind.
