Graphic Designing for the Color Blind Research Paper

Graphic Designing for the Color Blind - Research Paper Example People with color blindness cannot see either red/green shades or blue yellow shades. The completely color-blind or the monochromatic kind could only see gray. Here, the color confusion must be taken into account. According to Robert Hess (2000), the most common form of color blindness is the weakness in the sensitivity to the color green. Cases may vary as to how color-blind people are confused with colors. It is useful therefore, to know information such as how the green-blind selects opposite shades, which appear lighter than red while the red-blind chooses besides the red, green and brown shades. And so, what must be done is that to convert a graphic design work’s color palette into a palette of colors that can be accurately seen by color-blind audience. When instructing a person through colors or the graphic design relies on colors for cues, say, â€Å"Choose green to continue and red to stop,† then color-blind people see shades that do not correspond to their visual conception of those colors, then serious problem arises. Furthermore, in creating a color-palette for a color-blind friendly graphic design, one could consider the relative tonal values of adjacent colors. People that have forms of color-blindness, wrote Keith Martin, usually develop a greater sensitivity to tonal changes. For instance, a pink image could be made a bit brighter when set in a dark background so the color-blind audience could distinguish color elements better. â€Å"It’s only when the relative contrasts are too similar that separating colors become difficult.† (p. 28) For this factor, one could refer to the traditional color wheel for help. If one looks at the color wheel chart, one sees the primary and secondary colors. Besides this, however, and most important for the subject of this paper, is the fact that it is easier to identify color contrasts from the wheel. One could easily select opposites because they provide