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June 13, 2007
Kromofons - representing letters with colors
Oh boy. I just read an interesting article on ZDNet/News.com. A very creative guy named Dr Lee Freedman has come up with a cute idea called "Kromofons" (but the web site seesm to be down). Assign each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet a color. Then you can communicate in sequences of colors rather than letters. It allows for multi-layered communications as you can mix color-coding in with other kinds of graphics much more easily than you can mix text and graphics. Too bad the basic idea is too flawed to get very far - even though it could be fun.
Given that Freedman is a medical doctor, he should know that roughly 15% of males and 1% of females have some form of color-blindness (and not all the same kind, either, so it's not like you can just avoid certain color combinations).
[Edit: the numbers may be closer to 7.5% and 0.5% - looks like I may have added the stats incorrectly.]
But the bigger problem is more fundamental than that. Great, 26 colors covers English. What about all the rest of the world's languages (as my colleague John Hudson points out)? French? German? Heaven help you if you want to do Chinese or Japanese, with their thousands of symbols needed for basic literacy. The global standard for text encoding is Unicode, and it has some 100,000 characters today. Of course, even doing a few hundred colors, if you want specific colors to have unambiguous meanings, introduces big problems in color management.
I'm particularly curious how people are supposed to do things like write a handwritten note in this new format. Do we all need pens with 26 (or 26,000) colors built in? At least with Unicode, nobody is expecting people to read the sequences of Unicode codepoints....
Dr Freedman thinks Kromofons will transform how "we" think (I guess it's if "we" are people who write only in English, online). Oh well. It's still a fun idea, and these sorts of things are much easier to tear apart than to come up with.
[Update the same day: I was doing some more reading, and I see that Dr Freedman is himself red-green color-blind, and has given some thought to the color-blindness issues. However, that still doesn't deal with the cultural myopia issue. - T]
Comments
here is another example of using color for letters.
"Cover
New Order 'Power Corruption and Lies'
Peter Saville's design for the album had a colour-based code to represent the band's name and the title of the album, but they were not actually written on the sleeve itself (they were, however, present on the North American sleeve). The decoder for the code was featured prominently on the back cover of the album and can also be used for the "Blue Monday" and "Confusion" singles. Saville also used it on Section 25's album From the Hip, which is in many ways aligned stylistically with Power, Corruption & Lies and produced partly by New Order's Bernard Sumner."
[Great! Doing fun codes and such is cool. Believing that eventually many or most English-speakers will change how they read to some new color-based system is, well, a little nutty. - T]
The ZDnet URL you cited isn't working for me. We here at CNET publish the same News.com content at both ZDnet and CNET News.com, so maybe try this News.com URL for the same story instead (http://news.com.com/2100-1025-6187358.html).
Stephen Shankland
[Thanks, Stephen, I'll try that in the main posting. - T]
I think your numbers are high for color vision deficiencies. The numbers I've seen are closer to 8% of men and .5% of women. I don't think that changes your argument.
[I got the stats from this Wikipedia piece on color blindness. But I may have added them up incorrectly. On the other hand, as the good doctor says, if the color palette being used is limited and carefully tested, all but a tiny minority of color blind folks could distinguish them. (Mind you, it's still a typically anglocentric concept.) - T]
Note Arthur C. Clarke's Rama trilogy - I think the octospiders speak in colour too =)
Dear Bloggers;
Thanks for the reaction.
Look around carefully. Kromofons is already everywhere.
Other Languages.
As we speak, over 75 countries , and we estimate 13+ other languages are already using KMAIL between themselves in their language.
The same colors are being adapted to the same sound combos represented by different lettershapes. in different alphabets.
[Oh, great. It's single-byte codepages all over again. You want to take us back to a fundamentally bad, broken notion that Unicode gets us away from? No thanks. I want to be able to look at a character or its visual representation and know which one it is, not have to know a priori what the language/codepage is. - T]
The point is that all the world's alphabets are the SAME alphabet - an alphabet of shapes - regardless of what or which shape.
[You must be using "same" in a different way than the rest of us. Not all of the world's alphabets even have the same origin, and they sure as heck aren't the "same" now. But in any case, what about ideographic languages? China, Japan and Korea are not inconsequential countries on the world stage today. - T]
Rigid, Black and White, Decompartmentalized, Left to Right,Top to Bottom, Straight Line. One Dimensional.
[There are alphabetic systems that run right to left, or top to bottom first. There have historically been some that were not straight line, but went boustrophedon (even Greek), but AFAIK that usage has died out. But being more complicated is not necessarily an advantage for communication. - T]
5,000 years of the same system has given us this civilization. It is time to start building the next one ala Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
What will the planet look like in a 100 years, if it is designed with KF on the buildings and the cars, and the clothes and the .....skin
Google kromofons, half the sites are NOT in English, and some are not in the English or Latin alphabet at all !
ColorBlindness
More people are dyslexic than colorblind, yet we use directional letters, which KF avoids.
The Colors were choosen from my colorblind eyes perspective, to include 90% of those born with the same genomic variation.
Personal Pallette Preferences, per personal display device not only elliminate the argument but allow for any language.
It is the system that is proposed, and the hope that instead of bashing, there would be aid, but I guess the techno society is no more mature than the last civilization!
>i>[Spurious ad hominem attacks, particularly those with no necessary relationship to the debate at hand, don't help your position. - T]
Kronemes, to be used to represent phonemes. The same basic colors for the same BASIC sound combos.
Kromemes for Phonemes.
KFONS is short for Kromophonemics.
Unicode has 100,000 shapes but only 42 basic sound combo's and some few few use.
[This is an entirely different proposition, switching people from their existing writing systems to one that is phonetic. At a practical level, unless you become dictator of the world, it's not going to happen. - T]
The usefullness is not in doubt. It has been used for 35 years, look around you a bit more carefully. 35 years of word of mouth to designers have produced some interesting uses. We just decided it was time to tell the rest of the world, because there are problems to be solved. Big Problems.
Most of us have some type of display device, and use a keyboard. I don't even own a pen or pencil anymore, or have a phone line, or a real world address, so its time to catch up to the technology that we have been waiting for as the technology catches up to the idea.
Color Management. Our brains are really good at adjusting to diferrent light sources, and levels. It is the fact that the color could not be any other that gives it context.
Color management is always an issue, but hey, try taking letters and wrapping them around a pole, now try colors ?
Each medium has its target uses.
Multi layer trivergent trilingual multidimensional messaging is what you guys should be enthused over.
Animated messaging use for video games elliminating the need for letters to clutter the art on the screen.
And then there are hot air balloons, rock light shows, BODY PAINTING.
I mean, come on, there are some cool uses !
And some well wierd uses - ice cream flavors on a banana split just to spell LUV, to your sweetheart.
[Those are all fun things. But there's no driver fundamental enough to change the way the majority of the world does language. Without that, it could still become a fun toy that is used widely by youth (like the wacky abbreviations and emoticons of text messaging and online discourse), but that's not the same as taking over all communication. - T] - T]
Thanks for listening.
Anyone want to help solve the kromomessaging for the cell phone ?
lee@kfons.com
WAIT TIL YOU SEE NEXT MONTH's animated email, animated chatting, and the ever popular multi layer typewriter !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stay Tuned, and please help, there is a world to redesign.