ART 220 · Session 06 of 28 · Part I · Editorial
ART 220 06: Color Systems
Thursday, September 10
Global swatches, and why they exist: edit once, and everything painted with it changes. Value first: a picture that fails in gray fails in color. Then a tour of how illustrators use color, on the real pictures, from Malika Favre's three-color covers to Saul Bass, Whistler, Jon Klassen, Mary Blair, Tomer Hanuka and Hiroshige, with each picture's own count under it, so a palette reads as a choice among many and not the only one. Then the tools: Adobe Color, Coolors, oklch, Color Oracle, and Swatches, Color Guide and Recolor Artwork in Illustrator, with the same ideas in Photoshop. Exercise 3 runs in class on your own Project 1 set: every loose color down to three globals without losing the read. Vector drafts are desk-checked at the start. The target is one palette across the hero and both spots by the end of the day.
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In class today
In-class exercise · In class, forty-five minutes. Hand in before you leave
Color systems
Re-palette your own Project 1 set down to exactly three global swatches without losing the read. Then prove it by editing one swatch and watching all three artboards follow.
Graded 0, 2 or 3 the same day. The term's exercises share one grade, 15% of the course, lowest dropped.
Open the exerciseThe rule, the parts, the scoring, handing in
Artist of the day
Malika Favre
b. 1982
Every cover is three to five colors, and every one of them is a decision. The deck counts them; you count your own.
French illustrator, based in London and then Barcelona. Covers for *The New Yorker*, posters, and campaigns built from a few flat colors, hard edges, and the space left empty. Studied in ART 220 for how far three to five swatches can go when the value structure is right.
Look at
New Yorker covers2013 onwardThe New Yorker; her own site
Count the colors on any of them. Three to five, with the paper often doing the work of one.
GridsHer own site
Pattern pieces where one palette repeats across a whole field. What a set looks like when it shares its swatches.
MoviesHer own site
Film posters. Look at how few colors a poster needs to read across a street.
CollaborationsHer own site
Campaigns and brands. The same hand, a different palette each time, and every one of them limited.
Watch later
Malika Favre: Illustration, live from OFFF 2018Adobe Creative Cloud2018
A working session on stage. Watch how she builds from shapes and decides color last.
Creative process of illustrator and designer Malika FavreSTIR2022
Short. Her process and the less-is-more rule in her own words.
How Malika Favre landed the New YorkerD&AD Festival2024
The career talk: how the covers happened, and what a brief from the magazine looks like.
Materials
- Color LabThe class demo as a page. Hue, saturation and brightness on one color, the square in gray, why brightness is not lightness, then a palette in OKLCH with ramps, a gray check and a contrast table. Copy the hex list or download the swatches as an SVG for Illustrator.
- Adobe ColorThe wheel with harmony rules, palettes pulled from a photo, and a contrast checker. Saves straight into your Illustrator Libraries.
- CoolorsPress space, get a palette. Lock the ones you like and keep going. Export as an .ase for Illustrator.
- KhromaPick fifty colors you like, and it learns your taste and generates pairs.
- Realtime ColorsSee a palette on a real page, not on squares.
- oklch.comA color picker where equal steps look equal. Use it to build tints and shades that actually stay the same hue.
- Color OracleFree. Shows your whole screen the way a colorblind viewer sees it. Run it on your set before you hand it in.
- Sim DaltonismFree, Mac. A floating window that shows whatever is under it as a colorblind viewer sees it.