Design and Dark Winter
By now, all of the colours for the Sphere palettes, clear colours, pastels, darks and neutrals, are ready and calibrated for each category. But how are they going to be presented in a physical palette? It’s time to consider palette design, and how to communicate colour.
I have a confession to make: I’ve always felt I’ve done my clients a disservice when I handed them a palette.
The classic fan design is convenient for showing a spread of samples: easy to oversee and observe how each option is different. This works fantastic when you’re selling paints or wallpapers etc., where the client gets to the pick the one that they like best.
But colour analysis fans aren’t about picking options from a range. They are about communicating the range itself: an entire colour harmony family consisting of many individual sections of colour space, connected through shared temperature and tonality.
Classic fan design is essentially a cloud of separate dots: loose points in colour space. The Dark Winter palette is a fantastic example: its selection of reds and pinks is vast and a bit messy, containing warmer temperatures than there should be (see also article 4). How do you know if a red in the store is close enough to one of your dots – and therefore inside or outside the colour space area that surrounds the dot?
It is possible to know what colours work through harmonising with the fan, but it’s a very steep learning curve. It took me years of practice to get good at it, and I only perfected the skill when I trained as an analyst. Handing over the fan to a client after 10 minutes of practice, felt uncomfortable. So when it came to creating the Sphere palettes, I knew I wanted a design that was significantly easier to use.
Rather than a jumble of separate points, ideally I’d want want to communicate areas of colour space. Colour space itself is three dimensional, and any sections of colour space that are included in the palette are too. What if we could signal where the boundaries of each of these areas were? Then swatching would just become a simple question: is it inside or outside?
Three dimensions are difficult to communicate when we’re printing colours on two-dimensional materials, but two dimensions are perfectly doable. What if we created two-dimensional cards, and dedicate a full card for each hue?
For example your red card, we would be able to see exactly the hues that fit your temperature range: from bluest to orangest. The other dimension could run from lightest to darkest according to your tonality, and that way you’d have a two-dimensional cross-section of your entire red ‘blob’ in 3D colour space. That gives you so much more information than a couple of dots ever could.
The third dimension that couldn’t fit on the card is the brightness. The idea is that any brightness that is close to the card will be OK, and anything that comes up clearly blackened or greyed, or conversely too loud, is not.
So two dimensional cards would be the starting point. Next, if we have separate cards for each hue, we could connect them with a small ball chain rather than a grommet or book screw. It would lead to a design not dissimilar from a fan, but more flexible, so the bases of the cards do not obscure each other and every card remains fully visible. And we have the added advantage of being able to open and close the chain, so you can compare individual colours easier.
A two-dimensional design requires a shape and size large enough to fit several colour patches side by side. At the same time, cards can’t be too wide, otherwise even the ball chain won’t allow them to separate. They also need to be narrow enough to hold comfortably in your hand, and small enough to fit into a pocket or handbag, yet still large enough that the patches of colour can be easily seen. I mocked up a few shapes, and fairly quickly settled on an elongated oval.
Another thing I wanted was colours printed all the way to the edge of the card, for easy comparisons. However, when I use a two-dimensional oval, there will be colours that end up ‘landlocked’ in the centre of the card, away from the edge.
The solution was to create a small circular cutout in the centre of the card. This allows the colours on the inside to sit next to the inner edge, and the outside colours next to the outer edge. I can now put four colours across the card, and still all of them can sit next to an edge. This has proven super useful when swatching.
Next, the material. There are basically two choices for high quality printing: canvas and card.
Canvas is the traditional choice, but it comes with a number of downsides. Cutting canvas is a pain if online artists are to be believed, and works best when using straight edges. Cutting my oval design with a circular cutout would be a nightmare. Also, canvas is not made to be used in a fan. The thinner varieties are a limp, floppy and feel cheap, while the thicker varieties are prone to flaking off their printable coating when handled a lot. My old studio stash of canvas palettes all developed flaked edges where the coating detached from the canvas.
I decided to go with card instead. A variety of card that is very thick and sturdy would stand up to being handled well enough. Card is not at all prone to flaking, and would be easier to cut into this new shape. The oval shape also helps to deflect nicks and dings (although I don’t recommend having a palette loose in your handbag: some sort of pouch, bag or case is definitely a good idea).
My early tests were good. The swatching was astonishingly easy, while the palette was comfortable to hold and spread out. I liked it.
I’ve been using my palettes for a while now, and totally gotten used to them. When recently a previous client had questions about her old canvas palette, it was surprisingly hard for me to swatch in the old, seasonal way. My brain at first flatly refused to detect colour harmony with such a chaotic base to work off of. However, the client was waiting, and it took real some crunching of internal gears to give her the answers.
Admittedly, the only real weaknesses of the card material are water and dirt. Oils from food or skincare can stain the palette, so only handle the palette when your hands are clean.
Water is another problem. I’ve dunked an early production sample entirely underwater, carefully pat it dry, and left it to evaporate the rest. The inks are waterproof and aren’t affected at all, but the paper backside splits away from the coating. You’ll end up with twice as many flimsy bits of paper, rather than the sturdy cards they used to be. So keep your palette dry and away from dirt.
Canvas would have been marginally more resistant to water and dirt (although I’m not sure how much more – I’ve never submerged a canvas palette in water). However, I would rather create a palette that is user-friendly and which might get worn out at some point, than a palette that is slightly more resistant to wear and tear but unpleasant to use. Such a palette can only get stuck in a drawer, never used at all. Then what would have been the point?
For all that, I’ve had early samples that have been used for several years now, and are still in fantastic condition. As long as you keep your hands clean, water and food far away, and are very careful with makeup, a Sphere palette will have a lifespan of many years.
With the design finalised, what does a Sphere palette look like?
After the cover card, there are the cards that are dedicated to your main clear colours. Each palette has a card for clear pink, red, orange, yellow, lime, sap green, true green, turquoise, cyan, blue, purple and violet – of course adjusted for your temperature and tonality.
The pure cool and warm temperatures (A and E palettes) are slightly different though: they have nine clear cards rather than twelve. The reason for this is that they have certain hues that are fused to each other in colour space. For example, the warm reds and oranges come together into one ‘blob’. It felt silly to split them apart artificially, and therefore I put them on the same card. As a result, that would also free up some extra space, which I saved for the neutrals (more on those in a bit).
The next two cards feature the pastels and dark colours. I fit the entire spectrum onto a single card. Since these are the exact same hues as your clear colours, you can use the clear cards to determine if the hues are within, close or too far from your hue range. The inner ring of these cards represent the darkest limit for your pastels and darks, and the outer ring are the lightest boundaries of the pastels and darks. In this manner, you can easily triangulate your matches.
The final two cards are about the neutral families. We go from cream to taupe to coal brown on one card, and from white to grey to black on the other. Again, the pure cool and warm temperatures (A and E) are slightly different here. They have five cards to cover the two neutral families, which gave more space to fit some more intermediate values within the neutral families.
Reason 8: Classic fan design for palettes is unfriendly to use for swatching.
So instead: Sphere palettes are designed to be super easy to use.
With the Sphere palette design complete and the colour selections ready to go, what more is there? Well, you answer one question and it immediately raises another question. There were still colours left over. Where did they belong?