Colour design is a game

Turn colour advice into fun

For colour lovers, gamers and designers, CITY OF 8 developed “64”, a domino colour game and playful design tool in one. This innovative and fun design tool allows colours that are semantically related to be combined, enabling the creation of an instinctive and meaningful harmony in a colour plan. Delivering surprisingly beautiful combinations on top of it. The great thing about this tool is that the client has full control over the choice of the colours. Playfully, the game guides the client towards their own collection of colours, which are a reflection of their personality and needs.

In this case, light blue is the starting colour -defined by the CITY OF 8 colour test – with six possible colour choices on each block.

Structure

There are in sum 64 colour tints on 192 blocks which contain two colours each. The 64 colour tints in the game are a balanced selection from the CIELAB colour space, as a result of which all important tints are represented.

Because colours speak an emotional language which is more abstract than what we can express with words, the colour shades are coded with semantically meaningful codon codes: four letters combined in 3-letter words, according to the method of the Semantic Colour Space. This allows the combination of colours through their 3-dimensional codon code: the colours are combined when only one letter of the three letters of the codon word is different.

The user selected, out of the six suggested tints, a greyish yellow as the preferred colour to combine with light blue. In the next step, a dark yellow was selected to combine with the greyish yellow.

The user can lay chains of coloured blocks, choosing each time out of 6 tints that are codically and semantically connected, forming as such a colour plan that makes sense.

Fine-tuning light blue in the final set.

Finally, the tints need to be fine-tuned and translated into a colour system such as NCS, RAL, or colour collections such as Pantone or other. Fine-tuning depends on the surrounding conditions in which the colours will be applied.

In most cases, the starting colour will be the main colour in the colour plan. This means that it covers the largest area on which the other colours are applied. The last colour in a chain will then be the accent colour.