Colors: Structure, Perception, and Design
How I think about color across physics, materials, and human perception.
Color is one of the easiest topics to make look simple and one of the hardest to treat carefully. A wavelength spectrum exists in the world, but “color” only emerges after materials filter light and a visual system interprets the result.
That is why I like writing about colors as a bridge topic. It links optics, photonics, materials, and perception without pretending they are the same thing.
Some useful distinctions:
- Pigment color comes from absorption and scattering.
- Structural color comes from geometry and interference.
- Perceived color depends on illumination and context.
I am especially interested in the cases where those layers do not align cleanly. A sample may have a well-defined reflectance curve, yet still look different under another source or against another background. That gap between measurement and perception is where the topic becomes interesting.
That is also why “colors” is a better label here than “coloration”. It reads more naturally, and it keeps the emphasis on the phenomenon itself rather than on a narrower process description.
When I use this tag on the site, I want it to cover both the physical origin of color and the design choices that shape how people finally see it.