Maeda's SIMPLICITY

The Color of Black

When I was just starting to learn about the subtleties of the printing profession as a young designer, I was surprised at the importance of the color of black. A printing press technician's ability to output a proper black area was the measure of his skill. Today we don't think twice about printing a flat black square on a laserprinter—usually the black is fairly smooth and consistent. The printing press involves a combination of sophisticated machinery coupled with the visual and motor skills of the people on press. The layman isn't aware that most things that he or she sees printed black (especially book covers) are often times printed in black twice. That is, the image is printed in black, dried, and then re-inserted into the press to be printed again in the same pattern.

Double-hits in any color on the printing press is something of a supernatural feat (involving extra expense, and also painstaking registration of the images atop each other). On the computer of course, it's hard to imagine a black getting blacker. I've tried drawing with overhead marker pens on top of my monitor to get the effect. But it is not the same.

Another of my favorite mysteries is the color of white. Did you know that white doesn't really look very white? Try the following experiment on a white piece of paper: draw a 5% black filled rectangle atop the white. The square on the left looks like something printed in white, on white. You get the same effect when you draw with a white crayon on a white sheet of paper. The effect is quite subtle, and the intention is usually registered as a fact that modifies our own concrete perceptions.

Finally, in the spirit of black and white, there is the iconoclastic middle child ... gray. It is a pity that selecting a warm or cool gray in RGB is not an easy task—compare selecting a gray in hexadecimal code as the number or letter repeated: EEEEEE or 111111, etc, to a warm gray in hex C0B6B0 or cool gray in hex BDBEC5. If it were easier to select these subtle palette shifts, I imagine that the Web would be a noticeable few degrees warmer (or cooler) in general.