Color already plays a major role in communicating messages: Just think of those bright yellow Livestrong bracelets, red T-shirts for Bono's (Red) campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, or all pink everything for breast cancer awareness. Now, a new collaborative of design students and color specialists wants to strengthen the connection between color and cause.
The "Color in Action" project began when Pantone, which sets color standards for design industries, approached the graphic design students of San Francisco's Academy of Art University with a challenge: How can color be used as a social vehicle to create change?
Under the guidance of instructors Tom Sieu and John Barretto, the students held a few brainstorming sessions and split into eight teams, each with a social issue at its core. “Team Environment is tackling the issue of rising sea levels, while Team Discrimination is focusing on bullying,” Sieu says. Each team began researching how to use color as the foundation of a campaign for its chosen cause.
Sieu ensured his students took a measured approach. “For the first six weeks, even before we started to think about design solutions, it was all about research," he says. “That's rare in a design curriculum. Usually, on week two of any given design class, students go off and start designing without developing a true sense of the problem they’re attacking.”
Team Literacy proposed a museum at which avid readers would mingle with beginners, creating a supportive community to foster peer-to-peer education. Team members chose the color red, in part because it's a homophone to the past-tense verb “read.” Plus, the color connotes attention, urgency, and enthusiasm — all words the students felt were applicable to their cause.
Another team addressed an equally challenging cause by asking a pointed question: If you lost your eyesight tomorrow, how would you experience color? From that prompt, Team Sense investigated how to help colorblind people "see" color. The result was the Reveal Color Code System, which turns colors into simple shapes accessible to the colorblind. A hexagon, for example, represents blue, while a triangle stands for yellow. The team suggests the shapes be printed onto clothing tags, next to the garment care instructions. The students also propose using Braille on Pantone swatches. “We would like to imagine a world where the visually impaired can also enjoy the beauty of color,” the students wrote in a presentation of the project.
The main challenge facing students participating in the Pantone project is common to many design schools. “College students are taught about design, but then they get out into the professional world and struggle trying to get their message across,” says Giovanni Marra, Pantone's director of corporate marketing. He hopes the collaboration will teach students about the importance of storytelling and communication in design. “For the presentations, the students had to organize their thoughts and put together a cohesive presentation and communicate what they're trying to do,” Mara says. “I think that's something that's always lacking in design schools today.”
On May 14, the student designers will deliver their final presentations, with the winning team receiving a $10,000 scholarship from Pantone. Some of them may even become reality. “Some of the projects really are amazing,” Mara says. “We're hoping that a few of these projects will be realized, and potentially help fund one or two of these projects, whether they win the scholarship or not.”
Photos courtesy of Bob Troy; presentation slides courtesy of the Academy of Art University
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.