[music playing] THOMAS BOSKET: You wake up in the morning, you look in mirror, and you decide how you look or how you feel mostly dependent upon color.

LESLIE HARRINGTON: Color can affect you both physiologically and psychologically.

MR. GIF 1: You can make somebody feel something with color.

MR. GIF 2: Piss them off.

Yeah.

DOTY HORN: Color is everywhere.

It's just pervasive all throughout our lifestyles, our culture.

Whether or not you're verbalizing it, you're actually saying something to the world.

This is me because I'm wearing this color.

THOMAS BOSKET: Most people know color.

You know color.

You use it every day.

You interact with it.

That's how you make your way through the world.

And the color perceptors in your eyes are rods and cones.

Cones start with a C, and they perceive color.

Your rods receive greys.

Color theory, as a definition, it's more the mixtures and implementation of combinations of colored.

Color is the umbrella under which hue, value, and chroma rest, hue being the distinction between different colors on a wheel from red to red orange, so to speak, value being light and dark, and chroma being bright and dull.

The color wheel is a tool that helps us talk about the physical phenomena of light, and how we perceive it, and how we ultimately implement it in designs and the combinations.

We now teach more based on the harmonies and contrasts and how it relates to how you utilize color.

So students learn about complimentary colors, which tend to be opposite one another, and clash, which is just two colors, but they're one off of complimentary.

I think that there's been many different types of wheels.

And so I say to students nowadays, I don't mind if you invent your own wheels with your own nuanced understandings of color.

Because you're a different human then whoever came before you.

And who knows what you'll come up with that invents the future that we haven't even seen yet.

So you get a lot more interaction with color nowadays on multiple levels, and people are aware of this.

They know that they're affected by it soulfully, not just mentally.

And you should take that strength in your soul to build your own understanding because it is so personal, and you change.

LESLIE HARRINGTON: Color for me is what I call sort of a silent language or an emotional language that we all sort of intuitively know how to speak.

As we see color, we start to associate it with different things in our lives.

We have three different types of associations-- universal, cultural, and individual.

Individual color preferences are a really interesting dynamic.

I think color trends play a part in color preference.

Quite often, though, it may be associated with an experience.

They're definitely universal aspects to color.

And they are usually the physiological ones.

So red is definitely the one that increases your heart rate when you first see it.

It makes you want to move.

There are some studies that actually say that you'll walk faster, you'll eat more, you'll talk more when you're, let's say, in a red than any other color.

One great example is you think of the red carpet.

Well there's a reason why the red carpet is the red carpet.

And that's because it keeps the traffic flowing.

Where conversely, when you see blue, the opposite will happen.

So you become more calm and relaxed.

I think the one that is most interesting is the cultural differences.

For the most part, it's usually a learned response.

So when you're very young, you might think of brown as dirty and earthy.

But as time goes on, you learn to adjust those associations.

So all a sudden, when espresso and coffee became a whole new trend, brown took on a whole new association.

Or when we start to think of things like recycling or environmental concerns, it's natural for us to think of green.

So we develop different types of associations that we share with other human beings.

And as we grow, those become more and more meaningful to us.

DOTY HORN: I've gone back through the 20th century.

And I found that there were some ebbs and flows of color.

And it's just an evolution of a shift, not a revolution.

Color is not the place where I look first.

It's the why behind it-- the economic, the social, the political, the technological, environmental influences.

They're all the drivers of why color is always evolving and revolving.

With the economic issues that we've had in recent years, people gravitate to safe colors, grounded colors, rooted in the past and rooted into the ground.

So you bring up what we call organic colors.

And as we get familiar with that, there comes a time where we need a pick-me-up.

So take the familiar and just add a little accent of something new and give you a totally new look.

Here we were with the Depression.

People were so depressed they needed to put color back in their lives, so they colored glass.

And that's where Depression glass comes from.

Go back to the '60s, and we saw the psychedelic colors coming in because of the drug culture.

This pattern on pattern, color on color, and it was just a kaleidoscope of everything happening all one.

And in the '70s, we had to rest for a decade.

We browned out.

And remember the decoupage and almond, and beige, and browns of the 1970s.

So in forecasting, we look at those kinds of trends.

What are constant?

But also something new and different for the forecast in the future.

MR. GIF 1: As a GIF artist, you can only use 256 colors.

MR. GIF 2: I think the restriction is really cool.

It's like something common that all GIF makers have to think about when they're making a GIF.

MR. GIF 1: You work within this resolution that in today's high-def you never see.

So it almost gave it an aesthetic just because it was so constrained.

MR. GIF 2: It's minimalism.

It let's the viewer fill in the blanks.

MR. GIF 1: It's communicating with people via imagery.

MR. GIF 2: We like to experiment with different types of film.

That's why you never see the same looking portrait shot.

MR. GIF 1: You get like different colors that you wouldn't get with your perfect camera.

Like a VHS camera brings out like the oranges and makes everything super saturated.

You almost can't fake that kind of color because of the way the colors interact with each other.

You can always make the rainbow move because there's so many colors to cycle through.

You don't even have to be choosy on the colors as long as you have all of them in there.

MR. GIF 2: I'm like a black and white fiends.

Conscious decision of not using color and making it work, black and white is bold.

MR. GIF 1: And you throw in a little red.

It'll make that red pop just that much more.

MR. GIF 2: Variety.

If you see our page, if it was all color or all black and white, it wouldn't have much impact.

MR. GIF 1: When it comes to colors, though, you want to think of what colors match before you even worry about what colors you can't use.

You can make anything as long as you make it look intentional.

It's like a taste of nostalgia.

It's also the challenge of trying to convey an idea in these blocks.

LESLIE HARRINGTON: Usually people think picking the color for something it's pretty simple, but it actually gets complex pretty quickly.

DOTY HORN: Color is emotive.

And I don't think it ever stays static.

And so you're looking at color in a different way of accenting it rather than changing it abruptly.

THOMAS BOSKET: It's just that you have to learn to identify it and codify the language.

How do I arrange them?

And how do I speak about that arrangement so that other people understand what I'm creating or doing?

MR. GIF 2: Use black and white sometimes.

MR. GIF 1: Colors are just fun, man.

I just want to inspire people to make fun stuff.

It's just yeah.

[music playing] Be it red, green, blue, orange, yellow, red.

They are colors.

I like colors.

They are beautiful.

I like colors.

Everything I see is with colors.