Color Coding

Your brain will always perceive color faster than a text label, or even a shape. If you want to find things quickly, why not take advantage of it? The more you get used to something, the more it primes you are to focus that thing. Same principle behind having "work music" and "gym music", on a smaller scale.

The practicalities of color coding aren't hard. Pick a color family for each relevant category, then stick with it.

Problem is, all color systems are valid, but only consistent ones are useful. Ideally, you pick a system which works for everything in your life, so you never need to relearn it.

Here's my overarching guidelines.

Don't copy them, they're built around my personal associations. Use it as a starting point to think about your own. It doesn't need to be this formal, I'm just codifying decisions I've been making intuitively for years.

My color system equates certainty with relaxation. Those aren't synonymous concepts, it's an unintentional reflection of my perspective on life. Even the way I split up the spectrum into colors reveals my cultural biases.

This is the single area where something being your favorite color overrides all other considerations. There doesn't need to be logic behind that, just take advantage of it.

Color Basics

I'm going to gloss over formal color science and terminology here, because you don't need to know the difference between value and luminance to do color coding.

Roughly, there's three main components to how you perceive a color.

• Value, how light or dark a color is (black vs white)
• Saturation, how intense a color is (orange vs tan)
• Hue, the "color" of a color (red vs green)

Color coding primarily deals with hue for a couple reasons. First, hue stands out the most. Second, most products, including digital color palettes, only significantly vary the hue, with value and saturation set to match some preexisting constraint (e.g. to contrast with the background, or make a pleasing set).

You can make additional guidelines based on saturation and value, but practical application of them will be more happy accident than intentional system.

There's a secret bonus component to be aware of, colorspaces.

You've probably heard of RGB, CMYK, or HSV/HSL even if you don't know what they mean. They're all different ways of breaking a color down into components, but they're also used to represent different ranges (i.e spaces) of color. This is why colors look different when printing compared to on your screen, they literally can't represent the same colors. You shouldn't be color coding to such a fine degree that this matters, but you should know it exists.

The practical usage is perceptual brightness, which describes how colors of the same value and saturation in a colorspace can still look lighter or darker. For example, if you pull up an RGB color wheel the teal will look significantly lighter than blue. There are scientifically proven workarounds to get perceptually uniform colorspaces and palettes, but you probably won't run into them.

For basic color coding, you only need to be aware that this exists. If you can create a custom palette for something, trust your eyes over the numbers for what looks "even". If you have to use someone else's preassigned palette, be mindful of the perceived brightness' effects on the overall associations.

By the way, even if you think you aren't colorblind, take an online colorblindness test at least once in your life. It's quick and you might have one of the subtler colorblindnesses which is easy to miss.

Neutrals

It's entirely valid to skip these. They're the nothing colors, constantly overloaded for other uses. They also don't form nice sets with other colors, so they often aren't even options. Still, a color is a color.

White and black are both neutral depending on the context. In the digital world, one is background and one is content. It's pointless to attempt assigning additional meanings.

Grays are dull. They don't stick out visually, so I use them for things I don't want to focus on. Archives, empty time, things I have to be aware of but don't care about. If a gray is tinted towards a certain color, it takes on a bit of that association as well, but it doesn't have to.

Cool Colors

Cool colors are my favorites. I read them as relaxing and definitive.

Green has a lot of external associations with nature and growth. Personally, I don't like green as a color, so I ignore it when I can. Under a very constrained color palette, I might use it to represent things between warm and cool. External things I want to do can be green, like going to an event.

Blue is the color of relaxation and creation. Personal areas and hobbies are blue, as well as things which are certain or deterministic. Programming is blue both because it's one of my hobbies and it's logic based.

Purple is stereotypically the color of mystery and mystique. To me, that means the color of the self. Time when I'm alone, things which I care deeply about.

Warm Colors

Warm colors are intense and uncertain. Things which require attention are warm, as well as things which I don't like.

Reds are intense and jump out, especially with my preferences for cooler colors. It's the color of obligation and urgency. If I can't afford to miss it, it's red.

Magentas are weird. I don't find them garish like green, but they lie between purple and red, the peaks of internal and external. I avoid them when I can, and use them for marginal areas when I can't. I used to represent traveling with magenta, because it's both a time when I'm not obligated to focus on anything in particular and when I'm in the middle of obligations.

Oranges are a milder red. Things which are long-term obligations or things I don't particularly like are orange. Work, school, paperwork.

Yellows are the mildest of the warms. It's bright without being demanding. Uncertainty is yellow, but so is opportunity. Things involving others are yellow because they depend on someone besides me.

Practical Application

In most cases, color coding is primarily constrained by what you're working with. If you're working physical, you may only have a couple colors to choose from. Digitally, you can do almost anything. You might color code work as a single color in a calendar, but split it up into the entire spectrum for organizing your files. Don't be strict about it, just make sure the whole is consistent.

Let's take a look at my calendar.

Going off what I've already said, you could correctly guess how I'd split events based on type. Travel is magenta, socializing is yellow, work is orange, hobbies are blue, etc.

However, I found there that wasn't actually what I needed from my calendar. Here's how the current iteration works.

• Blue is certainty, so I use it for confirmed events which I know I will be at.
• Yellow is uncertainty, for things I want to do but aren't fixed in place.¹
• Red is urgency, so I use it for events which I absolutely cannot miss.
• Gray is dull, so I use it for things to be aware of but don't require my presence.

This seems contradictory. Under this system, I classify all my fixed obligations as "relaxing" blue and all my personal time as "uncertain" yellow. But, I already know the type of day I'll have without coloring my calendar. Weekdays are always obligation days, and time spent with others always ends up in the same few places on the weekend. Parsing a half dozen event colors won't make that easier to understand.

What I need to know is how much I should be aware of my calendar itself. Blue events are ones I've already planned for, yellow is the ones I need to check on when I think about changing how I spend the day. Red screams for attention.

It's a different perspective on the day that I wouldn't have otherwise, entirely conveyed through prior associations. Such is the power of color coding.

What do you want to see?

- Rew

Nightly Notes

So the other day when I said color coding is fun, I thought I meant this would be an easy lighthearted topic. 300 words of "color coding is useful and you should try it". Typical post.

Evidently what I actually meant is I've been thinking about this for too long and wanted to share. In retrospect, given how often I bump into color theory in other contexts, I should have seen this coming.

It feels good, finally ironing out the ideas I knew I had bouncing around somewhere but never logically worked through. I hadn't fully realized why I had reorganized my calendar with those specific colors until trying to write it out. This really was so much fun to write.

I'm off now, to go bask in that happy feeling. I think it's important to let yourself do that, when you can.

Back tomorrow as always,

- Rew