Exercise 9 of the Playing With Purpose series
The Exercise
Pick something you respond to emotionally but have never been able to fully explain. A piece of music that reliably affects you a specific way. A room that makes you feel calm or energized. A color combination in a painting or a photograph that stops you. A paragraph of writing where the rhythm does something to your body that you couldn’t diagram.
Don’t try to explain it yet. First just describe it precisely. What does it actually do to you? Where do you feel it? What does it make you want to do, or stop doing?
Then go looking for the structure underneath it. What are the actual elements at work? What is the relationship between them? Is there a pattern you can name?
Then answer these:
The reflection questions:
- Did finding the structure make the emotional response weaker, stronger, or the same?
- Have you ever assumed that understanding how something works would make it less beautiful? Were you right?
- Where in your own creative work do you rely on instinct because you haven’t yet found the system underneath?
- What would it change if you understood that system?
- What would you be able to do with that knowledge that you can’t do right now?
What I Learned When I Did This
I spent six months reading everything I could find on color theory. Not casually, not as background, but the way I do things when a question won’t let me go, which is to read until I’ve gone further than anyone I know has gone on the subject and I can feel the territory start to run out. I wanted to understand color the way I understood type, which is to say precisely and usably, not impressionistically.
The breakthrough came when I understood that hue-based color harmonies are algebraic expressions. That’s it. Complementary colors are 180 degrees apart on the color wheel. Analogous harmonies are adjacent angles. Split-complementary is a specific geometric relationship. Triadic is equidistant spacing. Every harmony that has ever made visual sense has a mathematical structure underneath it, and that structure is consistent and learnable and repeatable. Once I understood that, color stopped being something I either had an instinct for or didn’t, and became something I could work with systematically regardless of whether the instinct was firing.
I’ve had designers who have been working professionally for years tell me that nobody had ever explained it to them that way. That it finally made sense. And my honest response is that it probably was out there and they just hadn’t found it yet, because I didn’t invent this, I just went looking for it long enough and carefully enough that I could reassemble it into something I could actually teach and use. The math was always there. The color wheel is a mathematical object. The harmonies are geometric relationships. The emotional responses are, at their foundation, the result of specific physical relationships between wavelengths of light and the way the human visual system has evolved to process them.
Here is what that knowledge actually does: if someone gives me a strange color, a highly specific, unusual, personal color that they’ve built meaning around, and they want a full brand system that works with it, I no longer have to hope my instinct fires correctly. I can take that color and derive a complete, mathematically coherent set of relationships that will work together visually. I can lower the saturation and know with precision how that changes the emotional register. I can shift the brightness and know what I’m moving toward. I can build a palette that a client has never seen before that still, when they see it, feels right, because “right” in color is not arbitrary, it’s a property of specific relationships.
The thing I want people to hear when I tell this story is that understanding the structure did not make color less beautiful to me. It made it more beautiful, because I could see it more precisely. The emotional response to a great color combination is still a real response, it still lands in the body, it still does whatever it does to your nervous system. But now I can also see why, and the why turns out to be elegant in exactly the way that good mathematics is elegant. There’s a reason the structures that feel beautiful are the ones that feel beautiful. They are, in a very literal sense, correct.
I went looking for the system underneath the feeling. What I found was that the system and the feeling were describing the same thing from different angles, and neither one was more true than the other.
Playing With Purpose is a series of creativity exercises for people who want to understand and reclaim their creative capacity. You don’t need to be an artist. You need to be curious.
Further Reading
- Stage 3 in Design Thinking: Ideate (IxDF) — Ideation methods and creative exercises
- What Is Creativity? (IxDF) — Foundations of creative thinking
- What is Gamestorming? (IxDF) — Game-based ideation and creativity
