By Igor Asselbergs
More than half a century ago, Aemelius Müller, professor at the academy of Winterthur, Switzerland, came up with a formula that could predict the appreciation of a color-combination. In other words: Müller was able to predict which combination of colors most people would probably like.
Müller’s formula predicts that these color combinations will be considered as ugly by most people …
while these will be liked. How is this possible?
First we need to consider the ‘natural’ brightness of the colors of the color circle, as discussed in this post. You will notice that yellow, for instance, is a lot brighter than blue.
On a scale from 1 to 100, bright yellow has a brightness value of 90, while bright blue has a value as low as 35. Likewise, every hue in the color circle has its own ‘natural’ brightness.
Now take this combination. All three colors have the exact same hue of blue. The only difference between the colors is their brightness.
Now we pair the last combination with the ‘ugly’ combination on the left and the ‘nice’ combination on the right.
See what happened? Towards the ‘ugly’ (left) side the dark blue shifted to a greener hue, while the bright blue shifted to a more purple hue. This is contrary to the ‘natural’ brightness of the colors. After all, if you check the color circles you will see that green is much brighter than purple. Towards the ‘nice’ (right) side the dark color shifted to purple while the bright color shifted to green. This shift is in accordance with the ‘natural’ brightness of the colors.
The same goes for the red combinations. Towards the ‘ugly’ side the colors shift contrary to the ‘natural’ brightness while on the ‘nice’ side they shift in accordance with the natural brightness.
So here’s the simple formula: If a combination follows the natural brightness of colors, most people will like it; if a combination contradicts the natural brightness of colors, most people won’t like it.
There is some dispute in academia whether or not to interpret the ‘nice’ color combinations as good taste. The obvious implication being that the ‘ugly’ combinations are of bad taste.
I tested the formula on many occasions when lecturing a group of people. It never fails, and it’s always fun to confront people with the predictability of their taste. But I also noticed that people in creative professions, such as artists or designers, often tend to like the ‘ugly’ combinations. Because people in this group often lay claim to ‘good’ taste, in my opinion the ‘taste’ hypothesis doesn’t hold. As far as I’m concerned no one can lay claim to good taste. People like it or they don’t. Good or bad taste is a non-issue.
However, while Müller’s formula may not determine the difference between good or bad taste, it sure does predict common taste. And that makes the formula quite useful for any designer.
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Igor Asselbergs is owner of Colorjinn and writes his own color blog at Livelygrey.com.
Copyright 2009 Igor Asselbergs. This article has been reprinted with permission. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means for any purpose without express written permission of the copyright holder.
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Facinating article! Love it!
Very useful information. Irrespective of tastes, this helps to generate different bright color combination.
The underlying principle is very interesting. I think our vision is meant to allow us to make it through a 3-dimensional world and any flat imagery (even just a pattern) becomes “gamey”. Why we would prefer one kind of order over a another is really interesting and I plan to try to generate some similar images to try out on my students (art class) to hear their reactions. It seems to me his formula produces more natural (as opposed to contrived) color relationships. I agree on taste; the longer I work with color the less I see color solutions as good or bad.