Talking about color is like dancing about architecture

“Talking about love is like dancing about architecture” –Angelina Jolie in Playing by Heart. Trying to describe a feeling like love, is similar to trying to describe colors, because they are something seen, not written. How does one go about describing something like that? You’d need another language. Munsell points to the similar problem in music, for which a language of notes was created. Things you feel, see and hear, can be extremely difficult to describe with words and symbols not created for that exact purpose. As someone with a mathematician’s mind, I am in complete agreement, nay, love with Munsell’s discourse. The manner in which he has described the color sphere has brought into blissful clarity, a subject which, as he points out, has been a jumble of non-applicable language terms attempting to describe something for which they were not originally intend. Canary yellow? What if the canaries in another town are different from my canaries?! How can I order canary yellow fabric if they have different colored canaries!!!???

Munsell’s color sphere will be greatly beneficial to me within my design practice because it will allow me to explain colors which before would have been greatly subject to interpretation. By using his system to define hue, value and chroma, one can accurately convey the three principle characteristics of color. I consider this to be nothing short of revolutionary. It has clarified the differences for me between value and chroma, with which I was struggling to some extent. By imagining colors as something which can be explained within three dimensions, I will be able to communicate with precision that which is “not quite right” about a color. For example, if the canary yellow fabric is in fact too dark of a shade, and I imagined something lighter in value. Or perhaps it is too dull, and I would like something with a brighter chroma. By using value and chroma, the hue of yellow can much more aptly be defined.