How do I use color to organize the display into perceptual chunks?
A good design will use color to save the viewer from thinking too much. With several hundred million years of evolution behind us, color perception is deeply wired into our fabric. As a result, color perception is fast, accurate, automatic, and effortless. On the other hand, thinking is a relatively recent evolutionary advance, and we are not yet very good at it. By thinking, I mean reading text, attaching meaning to an icon, searching memory, etc. These activities are relatively slow, error-prone, require mental resources and effort and take learning. How many times have you misread a word? Probably often. How many times have mistakenly seen blue as orange? Probably never, even if you are a dichromat. In sum, a designer should strive to capitalize on our hard-wired perceptual capabilities whenever possible. The role that color plays in our normal behavior and interaction with the visual world is a complex topic, but Ill try to condense it into Readers Digest form. It is first absolute
