Dreaming of a [Mission White] Christmas

Winter is officially here in Chicago and a look out the window brings only one thing to mind: White is here for a while. With the fresh winter landscape on display, the picture outside seems cleaner, purified, even pristine for at least a short while. So now seems as appropriate a time as any to broach the subject of white, from designer-speak.

Most people think of white as an absence of color – a culling of hue which beckons all visual imagery to its most basic and core foundation. If you remember back to your wax crayons from grade school, that white space on the page was the only remaining part of the paper on which you didn’t scribble an image of green grass, blue sky, yellow sun, or purple dinosaurs. A closer look on that same page might reveal areas where the purple mixed with the green to create an even darker shade of greenish grey or black. The white of the page was pure. The most colored part of the page was the darkest. This type of color mixing is what is called ‘subtractive color’, where white is the absence of pigment, and it’s the way most of us first experience and tend to identify with color. The color white, then, in most social circles, evokes a sense of purity and clean-slate opportunity.

What most people don’t realize though, is that there’s another side of white in the world of ‘additive color’ where white is the combination of all colors. Contrary to intuition, additive color is the way we most frequently experience the world around us, as light from the sun is absorbed and reflected through our retinas. Think back to grade school again, but this time in your science class when you saw light being reflected through a prism to create a rainbow of color. White is frequently loaded with color.

From a designer’s perspective, most people don’t realize that white rarely means white, either. Shifting my gaze from the snow outside, to my treasured 12′x12′ wall of laminate color chips, I can count more than forty laminate color samples which call themselves ‘white’ in one shade or another. A side-by-side inspection will quickly reveal how “Carnation White” differs from “Chalk White” or “Smoky White”. White can be deemed a dilemma or a dream, depending on how you use it, and that’s the fun of implementing it into your design.

Want to know more about color theory, or how to properly whiten your next project? Drop us a line.