If you are suffering a moderate to strong color blindness, it’s always a hassle if you have a crayon box in front of you full of colored pencils. – How about naming them? Could this help?
A french student from a packaging design class had just this idea. All white crayons named with the corresponding color.
Her professor says: “After all isn’t color subjective? Think of the colorblind people for example. So here’s the objective set of color pencils.”
Ok. I am colorblind and think about it. And I think it’s of no use for us colorblind. Why?
As a colorblind person I have great difficulties in seeing, differentiating and specially naming colors. So if I see a certain color I can’t tell you if it is red or green, because I can not see it.
Now, let’s imagine I grab a colored pencil which is just plain white only with its color name printed on it. I actually don’t really know how this color looks like as I don’t know which name corresponds to the color I see. Ok, if I know the color of a certain thing it could help (I learned that leaves are green—most of the time). But otherwise the name is not a clue for me at all.
What I need is to see the color so I can compare it if it really is the one I need. And even if I see it, there is still a big chance that I still will mess them up. So names are for nothing and colors are unfortunately not much better.
I actually have a pretty good idea of what colour names mean and how they relate to the shades of “real” colours – at least as my wife sees them. I see colours just fine – I can’t discriminate between them.
The other thing that I notice is that I don’t have good “colour memory.” I can sometimes discriminate two adjacent colour patches, but if they are separated, they become indistinguishable.
This IS usefull. I remember coloring a map for school and a friend comes by and says ‘why are you using brown when you should be using green?’ I was actually holding green in my hands (the friends knows of my coloblindness) and promptly swapped the pencil. That’s why i love Jolly color pencils since they have the color written on them – no mistake can be done then.
And like DOnald, i can also see all the colors, i just can’t differentiate between them correctly.
hello there,
let me tell you my funny story.
i was in the primary school and we were supposed to make a picture of the spring. i am creative and i like to draw, so i was very proud of the trees and animals i drew. until, the professor came to me and asked: ‘and why is grass in your picture colored orange?’ i felt ashamed, but came up with a good answer: ‘normal is boring’.
best regards,
robin*
:-) Sounds like me!
There’s a funny story I told when someone guess I’m colorblind. When I was a child, there was a geography test we were asked to paint a map following instructions: North region with “X” color, South with “Y” colour, and so on… I mixed all up! The teacher asked: “Don’t you know the color’s names?!” what a shame… Than my mon realise I had some kind of color blindness. Now I know its deuteranomaly, as far as I remember, I mix green with brow, blue with purple, pink with purple, sometimes red and brow… They are SO alike! It doesn’t bother me very much at all. Sometimes I just say I’m not very good with colours.
I’m having a great time in this site!
Greetings for all colourblind friends out there!
Ângelo