Graphic Design and Colour Blindness

“It’s like tone deafness. You know, the keys on a piano are like the spectrum of colours and a person who is tone deaf can play C and C# and they hear the same note. And I think that’s kind of what it’s like.”

In my Critical and Contextual Research Project I want to focus on colourblind people and the impact our work as graphic designers can have on their lives. A lot of people underestimate that colour blindness is a serious problem.

When thinking of colour blindness, people often believe that a person who suffers from this condition can’t see any colours at all. In fact, there are people that can only see in black and white (which is called monochromacy ) but it is a very rare condition. People who can only see two out of the three primary colours (red, green and blue) are called Dichromats which is a much more common condition.

If a person is for example red-green colour blind, they have problems in differentiating between red and green; yellow, orange and brown, as well as blue and violet.

This leads to an interesting problem. If designers don’t consider colour blind people in their work, they might have problems in reading text, seeing symbols or in the worst case, they cannot access the information at all. If a designer is not even aware that 1 in 12 people are colour-blind , how do they know that they can’t use colour as the primary cue to give away information? Should information not be accessible to everyone?

As a graphic designer personally I have never been trained to consider colour blind people in my work. Not at school, university or the advertising agency I worked for.

Using England with a population of 50,000,000 people as an example, 4,000,000 of them are statistically colour blind which leads to the fact that all of them in some cases cannot access information if the colour choices are not thought through.

Dichromacy affects 8% of the European males which is actually a big part of our society. So why would we exclude them by not considering them in our designs?

So I asked myself the question, are there ways to simplify the perception of certain information we as graphic designers can use?

Colour blindness in general

Different types of colour blindness

The retina in the human eye has photoreceptors (neurons) which are capable of detecting light. There are two different kinds of photoreceptors that are called rods and cones. Rods can only

recognize night and dark, but no colour, which is why the rods are responsible for night vision. Consequently we can’t see colour during the night.

The cones however can detect accurate colour vision during daylight if they are fully functional which is not the case for a colour blind person.

A normal-sighted person is called a trichromat