Colors as visual communicators
By Florie Lyn Masarate
People love stories. This must have originated from the time when getting tucked up in bed means a story afterwards. Fairy tales are colorful stories with colorful endings. Then came those fiction books with twists and turns and sometimes not so colorful endings. People early on are thought to see experience and feel colors not just in its visual state but the colors that come from words. Words can be made colorful. If we put it into another prospective, visual and colors can also tell stories, like words.
Visual and colors are put early on in coloring books to make kids understand things in the most simple way. By arranging chronologically, a story can be created, depending on the understanding of the one reading the colors.
This is also true in prints and designs. People tend to get tired of reading long and flowery words that only end up meaning the same things. Some can be so predictable that after reading the first paragraph, the ending can be told. Others may get too jumbled up in the words that it will took awhile understanding, if patience does not run out first.
Using visuals, stories become more compelling because people can produce their own story, go into different directions with just the colors. What makes them able to do this are the absence of words that sometimes spoon-fed them into what they are supposed to be reading. The story is laid out in front of them. All they had to do is read. Imagination need not be used. This is in contrast to colors that story tell. Expounding the imagination is just one of the things these visuals can do. With just drawings, a story can enfold before the reader’s eyes. It is like creating your own story with no limitations as to when to change and stop.
The colors are used to give meanings and not just to please. It is common knowledge that colors are made to be refreshing and pleasing to the eye. It is therefore a new way of looking at colors when they are there to explain and to give directions to a material. It is not a crime to exaggerate in using colors. Because unlike what people are told, there is no such thing as over colored. There is only more colors to choose from and using it to its maximum can only make it best, not worst.
Colors are just like symbols. The seers get to think for themselves. They make their own ideas. They do not wait, they think ahead. That is what colors can do.
About the author:
Florie Lyn Masarate got a flair for reading and writing when she got her first subscription of the school newsletter in kindergarten. She had her first article published on that same newsletter in the third grade.
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