• Concrete: Material of the Future!
• Finding Beauty in Problem-Solving – An Interview with Illustrator Jean Tuttle
• Complaining is Silly - An Interview with Stefan Sagmeister
• My starting point is the graphic reworking of surface
• Self-sufficiency, environmental protection and cultural promotion – All in a day’s work for Ute Hübler and Sonja Nitschmann of espírito brasilis
• Designs Unseen – An Interview with "Micronaut" Martin Oeggerli
• The Passagen Interviews – Katja Gehrke
• The Passagen Interviews – Doty Horn
• Taking Security from Effects – an interview with Dieter Hermann of Printcolor
• Designers, have your say! The XYMARA.com Passagen Interviews!
• Personal magic – the art of Alison Ann Martin
• Design Trends in Asia - Nature, Harmony and the Embrace of the New
• Straight Lines, Hidden Value
• I feel I gave a little something, a little beauty to the world
• We believe it’s a new industrial revolution
• How about good things? Or interesting things?
• Design also always has a function
• Wood is a Very Modern Material
• I don‘t care what color a car is, just as long as it is black.
• Every design process is inspired by something else, what the designer has seen, heard or felt.
• Aren‘t our color preferences always based on our childhood memories?
• There is a strong need for richness
• We live in an inflatable culture. It‘s hard to know which values are real.
• Colors that create value are trendy ...
• There is a corresponding emotion to each color
• We would love to live outside the city. But we stay and use countryside colors ...
• There are too many colors around. I only need black.
• Interview with Warren Neidich, Artist
• Interview with Simon Husslein, Product Designer
• Interview with Clarissa Tossin, Graphic Designer
• Interview with Uleshka Asher, PingMag Chief Editor/Artist

What color is a piece of string?

An interview with communication designers Sonja Schaefer and Uli Weidner about an exciting field of color design beyond fashion and trends.

Page 1 | Page 2

By Dirk Agelek

You have been designing school textbooks for a few years now. In what respect does this work differ from your other design jobs?

For one thing, unlike a brochure, a catalogue or a corporate website, school books have to prove their worth in the market. Also, the contents have to meet didactic requirements, which requires them to be structured in a complex and functional way. You will rarely find just one individual schoolbook - most are part of a series of textbooks consisting of perhaps 50 or more volumes. Our task consists in developing recurring visual elements which match the content concept, serving both the recognition of the series and the differentiation of the individual volume.

Well, that is something design always has to do...

That’s true, but with schoolbooks things do work a little differently. Schoolbooks are educational tools which support the teacher, which means they have to follow a certain didactic concept, and have to fulfill their educational purpose. For the children, they have to be a fountain which feeds their personal development. Both groups should actually like the book, so that they enjoy achieving good results with its help. This means that the publisher's promise to provide high-quality contents must be reflected in the visual design.

So lots of colors means better school results?

Well, it's not quite as simple as that. Studying is always hard work, even if you give the children pretty pictures. Actually, the simplification of the 4 C printing technology, which has led to more and more colors and pictures, seems to be somewhat counterproductive. Colors will only be respected and the contents will only be taken seriously if the colors are used in a meaningful way and create contrast. If you use too many colors and if the colors are not harmonized, this will lead to colorful unrest, and break concentration. The targeted use of colors, however, can guide the student and make contents, such as mnemonic sentences, easier to remember. Both the author and the designer need to practice a lot of discipline in finding the right measure, and above all they have to be interested in each other's work. We are observing the findings of brain research on the processing of visual impressions with a great deal of interest.

What are the latest results?

It is no longer a secret that learning, understanding and memorizing can be helped or hindered by design. But an attractive cover alone will not make a long-term bestseller.

Schoolbooks used to be rather dry, today many seem to be overly cluttered.

Over the last five decades, educational research has changed its approach many times and it seems that it will continue to do so. It is the same with visual design. Today, more and more pictures and illustrations are used in addition to the visual elements used to differentiate between functional elements, such as study text, quotes, or texts taken from a different medium.

Let’s talk about colors: their meanings are ambivalent and subject to trends. How can you reconcile this with long-term production and lifecycles? What is, in your opinion, the role of color psychology criteria?

These are what we call soft factors. Depending on the context, they can have opposite effects and interpretations to those intended. Just think about the different cultural, social, ethnographic, situational or historic aspects of colors. And in addition there are always biographical factors which shape the individual’s ‘taste’.

Can you give an example?

Take red, for example. Both psychologically and culturally, it is considered to convey activity, or even aggression. It is the favorite color of more than one third of all Western Europeans, but few of them want to wear red clothes or paint their walls red. In school, red is used to mark mistakes, which makes it a demotivating color for children. And it would be practically inconceivable to print the cover of a language study book for learning Russian red, whereas for math books, color connotations are completely different.

If color is that important, why are you calling it a ‘soft' factor?

We often find that the quality of a design is judged very emotionally based on the color, and based on the tastes of the editorial team. If there is someone who doesn’t like the color green, there is no point in telling them that green is the color of hope, optimism and calmness. But this would be too simple a criterion for choosing a color, anyway.

So how do you do it then, how do you choose colors?

We generally suggest a system consisting of several colors used to characterize the distinguishing elements of the title, and pictograms, colored surface areas or structures. The decisive points then are the proportions and color contrast, as well as the mood of color harmony. An individual color may be altered as long as the color system (e.g. the functional use for certain elements) and the logic of the color quality (e.g. brightness or saturation) are preserved. All of these elements together then make up the product family’s identity.

Page 1 | Page 2