Color is Everything
UXD 60001: Principles & Concepts
Reflective Journaling Week 2
As a designer the title of this post, Color is Everything has always rung true, but never in the way that it now will as week two is coming to a close in my UXD Principles & Concepts class. There are were quite a few things that I was struck by or made an impression in the second week. The first was the amount of reading, while I knew coming into graduate school this would be an adjustment, diligence and routine changes were the name of the game. With that being said, I am enjoying both books that are the main guides in the course. Our focus last week getting into Don Norman’s, The Design of Everyday Things and if you haven’t read it, watching this YouTube video could convince you to add it to your reading list. This week our second book was introduced, Designing with the Mind in Mind, Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Guidelines, written by Jeff Johnson.
It is in the reading from Jeff Johnson where I my jaw dropped open and it left me sharing the readings with my husband, Jeremy. Chapter Four, Our Color Vision is Limited and Chapter Five, Our Peripheral Vision is Poor were definite standouts for me. They both addressed the science of how our eyes operate and how the science impacts the way our decisions as designers can impact the effectiveness of things we are creating. Before reading these chapters my decisions as an experienced print design were for aesthetics only—going forward as I experiment in UI or create any new print designs color combinations for those that are visually diverse as well as other successful design considerations will be top of mind.
Our eyes are amazing tools that assist us every second of our days. Besides being impacted by the guidelines for using color, Jeff Johnson discusses in Chapter 5 how the fovea in our eye compares and works with our peripheral vision and some considerations to make while designing based on how our eyes function. In his key takeaways Johnson states that for a non-visually diverse user our fovea make up only 1% of our visual field and our peripheral vision has 20/200 vision. The vision of our peripheral in the United States is considered legally blind and equivalent of looking through a frosted shower door!! Now when I think about that… I am truly amazed and will forever consider Johnson’s guidelines going forward.
To hear a bit about these two items Jeff Johnson spoke to Google back in 2013 on the principles from his book. The link I am including below starts as he talks about the content in Chapters 4 and 5.
Designing with the Mind in Mind | Jeff Johnson | Talks at Google - Some people have color blindness
Photo by Petri Heiskanen on Unsplash