I contributed a chapter on environmental colour mapping to the book ‘Colour for Architecture Today’ in 2009.
Edited by Tom Porter and Byron Mikellides of Oxford Brookes, ‘Colour for Architecture Today’ explored colour and its role in the built environment. Delving beyond aesthetics, chapter authors focused on changing attitudes to colour, colour psychology and new technologies relating to colour and light in architecture.
In the chapter I contributed, I discussed environmental colour mapping. This is a process of identifying and mapping the colour characteristics of an environment using digital technology. In the 20th century, this process was conducted manually. However, advances in technology enabled the digitisation of the process. My chapter discussed this process in respect to environmental colour mapping, previously developed by Tom Porter and Jean-Philippe Lenclos.
Colour mapping is also an important process in corporate identity and logo design development. Colour mapping identifies key corporate colours within a particular industry sector. This process provides insight into patterns of similarity within that sector as well as opportunities for colour differentiation. New brands need to conduct colour mapping studies to ensure their corporate colours are cohesive yet unique within their sector.
I have been commissioned to conduct colour mapping studies for a number of commercial clients. In each case, clients were launching a new brand and needed to investigate potential logo colours. The logo colours needed to be cohesive with their target market and uniquely identifiable.
In 2011, I published a related article: Logo colour and differentiation: A new application of environmental colour mapping. This article was published in the leading journal on colour, Color Research and Application, and you can check it out on their website.
I applied environmental colour mapping in my PhD research. This book chapter represented one section of my PhD thesis and was published within 12 months of submitting my PhD thesis. You can check out my PhD thesis at the University of Sydney digital collections website.
‘Colour for Architecture Today’ is available from Amazon.com
