The Conundrum of Colorblindness & Creativity

Image via Ishihara Test for Color Blindness

What number do you see?  The answer is below…

Colorblindness has been a wonderful blessing for me.  There are so many things I would like to do – so many areas to explore – so many interesting and mind blowing fields of study to dive in to.  Yet, not only am I a man with limited resources, but I am colorblind.  This wipes out being an Airforce pilot, correctly matching my clothes in the morning or becoming a designer of any sort.  I don’t even have that choice.  I know that if I did have that choice that my life would be even more complicated with new areas of interest to explore.  But, thankfully, I was born not seeing all the colors of the rainbow.

This is made known unto you, my dear reader, as an apology for the pain you have gone through as you have tried to read this blog.  The colors, admittedly, have been horrible.  I keep trying, but I give in.  Christine Martell, last week, showed me a trick to match colors which was very helpful.  YET, there is so much more to it.  Shades, accents, and colors being interpreted as and arousing feelings (which colorblind people just don’t understand because we, for the most part, ignore color altogether).

So, after looking at hundreds of designs over the last few months, I finally found one that, in my estimation, looks semi-modern and sports shades of gray.  I can work with gray.  Sometimes I see gray as green or other colors, so even though it might be gray to you, I see so much more!

But, again, I apologize for any pain I have inflicted upon any of your eyes.  Although I will continue to tweak it slightly (oh, ever so) I don’t plan on changing it any time soon.

Simplicity is what I am destined for in a color confused world.  My wife would say that gray is so boring.  That might be true, but that is all I can do.

Recently I read slide:ology, a fabulous book on presentations (if you don’t own it, repent).  Unfortunately, the color part of that book went right over my head.

Even though it may be boring, I hope the posts aren’t (I hope).

Answer to the colored dots above:

The individual with normal color vision will see a 5 revealed in the dot pattern.

An individual with Red/Green (the most common) color blindness will see a 2 revealed in the dots

Tagged as: Color, Color blindness, ColorBlind, Web design