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How does color affect architecture?
Strategic use of color in environmental graphic design
Our daily life includes constant contact with the city. As we move through different spaces, we ask ourselves questions such as “Where am I now?”, “Where am I heading?”, “What am I looking for?”, “What is this building?”, and “How do we do it?” Am I experiencing this space?” While spatial encounters may seem counterintuitive, Environmental Graphic Design (EGD) provides the answers by serving as an important interface between us and the built environment. Design involves graphic elements that fuse with architectural, landscape, urban, and interior designs to make spaces more visually appealing. Informative, easier to navigate, and memorable.EDG is made up of three main elements: text, shape, and color.Typically text and shapes encapsulate graphic information, but color displays, amplifies, and helps communicate it within busy city scenes.In spatial experiences, we perceive colors first, because our senses register Mostly visual sensations.Therefore, strategic use of color is critical for environmental graphics to provide a multi-layered experience of imagery of identity, sense of place, and emotional connection.
One of the earliest forms of graphic text inscription on architecture is Egyptian hieroglyphics, which placed stories on buildings as a historical document for the civilization. Today, environmental graphic design has evolved to encompass more than just storytelling. It is present in signs, billboards, traffic lights, mailboxes, public facilities, and other experiential spaces of the city that visually translate the complex operations of communities. He is able to communicate all these things through color as an interface that has a direct impact on perception. Color not only layers information in a fun and beautiful way, but also creates a sense of cohesion, relaxes people psychologically, reduces anxiety in large-scale structures, and creates order in urban environments.
In graphic design, certain colors are known to elicit specific psychological responses. Red evokes strong feelings such as passion, excitement, and urgency. Blue is often associated with calmness, confidence, and reliability. Yellow represents happiness, energy and optimism. Green mostly symbolizes nature and can denote health, harmony, and balance, while purple represents luxury, creativity, and spirituality. Strategically combining these colors and layering them with the existing aesthetic of the buildings and the city not only allows for the perception of information, but also evokes an emotional response. For example, in hospital designs, green and yellow are commonly used for graphic elements on white interior surfaces to reduce patient anxiety and improve overall health.
Furthermore, recent research on the effect of color coding on environmental graphic design in children’s hospitals has demonstrated the power of colorization and thematic design in facilitating young patients. The authors Asri Dwiputri and Wirania Swasty suggest that all banners for a specific department can be interconnected through a common design and color-coded theme. This can entail using a blue ocean theme for a specific floor, a green forest theme for the outpatient department, or a yellow desert theme for the intensive care department. Through this approach, color in environmental graphic design can make complex spaces that cause panic more comfortable.
Color is a strategic tool used in designing wayfinding systems that help people navigate through a place or city. It is used to organize the visual hierarchy of messages, and to control what viewers should do see first and then Read on. For example, a site’s title can be displayed in bright colors and its site in warm colours, reflecting the hierarchy of how the message is understood. This, along with scale, size, and typography, is used to effectively guide people in complex places such as train stations, airports, and stadiums.
In addition, when designing such buildings, the choice of signage color depends on the surrounding visual environment, including background colors of walls and windows, the amount of daylight in the space, lighting, and other spatial elements. In visually busy places such as airports, the power of contrast is used to improve signage readability. This ranges from the single color contrast between the lettering and its signage background to the difference between the signage and its borderline visual environment.
The choice of color becomes more complex in the city, as the multiple visual catalogs of the different buildings hosting the banners and advertisements compete for recognition. For example, Times Square, the famous commercial intersection in midtown Manhattan, is an urban area defined by multiple layers of color contrast in environmental graphic design. The choice of new signage in the area is strategically based on the visual perception of the nearby buildings, the color code of the graphics it displays, and how the new color stands out within the existing color scheme.
Times Square also shows how the range of colors in Environmental Graphic Design (EDG) contributes to the making of places. The use of color in terms of lines, patterns, and animation can completely transform an area, giving character to office spaces, restaurants, shopping malls, and unique places in the city. By drawing on the emotional properties of color to tell stories in the drawings or create images that resonate with the community, a sense of identity can be built for the occupants.
Graffiti is a famous example of the role of color in the making of places within cities. Color is used through graffiti on the city walls for self-expression, showing social and cultural tensions, and asserting a claim to a particular place. When choosing a simple color scheme in graffiti, the perception is directed to focus on geometric shapes. Meanwhile, the swirls of bright primary colors have so much movement and energy, they seem to be dancing. These strategic uses of color in graffiti environmental graphics are designed to make the art memorable and draw emotional connections from the communities.
The use of color is crucial in every aspect of environmental graphics. It affects how individuals move through space, interact with others, and feel a sense of belonging. Through properties such as visual hierarchy, emotional perception, contrast, identity, and other aspects of color theory, the strategic use of color is used to design better systems for defining avenues, galleries, public facilities, and unique spaces in a city. As we deconstruct different aspects of the city, our visual connection with color forms an underlying layer of environmental graphic design that illuminates our experiences.
This article is part of the ArchDaily topics: Color in architecture Presented by sto.
Material, texture, luster and color are inseparable – the building’s identity becomes evident in the architect’s choices of how they are combined together. Looking at the life cycle of a building in terms of design, occupation and legacy, we know that achieving the right expression equals the success of the building. Sto’s innovative materials and data-driven color system complement design ambitions with technical know-how and rigorous testing, to deliver capabilities, accuracy, and longevity when building in color.
produced by stoThe short documentary Building in Color is a cinematic exploration of the role of materials and color in architecture, taking the work of Stirling Prize-winning architect Michael Welford CBE (1938 – 2023) as its starting point.
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(tags for translation)architecture