Designing With An “Handicap”
Our Robin is a designer and is colour-blind. A combination where the question “How can you make correct and appealing designs?” is somewhat rightly asked. As a designer, you’re responsible for formatting and editing documents prior to publication. Robin ensures, among other things, that all the posters, flyers, web designs, business cards, all types of resources actually, are designed and then formatted in a correct manner so that they can be properly marketed in the world in the future. He only has to deal with a small obstacle…
From an early age, Robin sees colours a bit differently than most. Well, just a little bit different… ok, a lot of the time completely different. Since separating colours is difficult for him. Especially when colours are similar to each other. Take yellow and green, or blue and purple. For Robin, they are just the same. But also red and green at a traffic light is hard for him to distinguish. In fact the lights are placed on top of each other, especially for people who are colour blind. That way, people can distinguish the lights because of their positions and aren’t dependent by the colours of the lights. Learned something new today!
Designer and colour-blind
Designing with colour blindness is the weird combination you would think it is. However, It doesn’t have to be a problem all the time. Determining colours is always hard for Robin. However, the colours within a corporate identity are generally already chosen by someone else and he no longer has to choose the colours himself. Besides, colour codes are his best friend, he searches on Google for the colour and thus indicates which value this colour has. You don’t really need knowledge about colours at all! His dad taught him a wise lesson long ago: turn your disadvantage to an advantage. “Colour blindness is definitely a good excuse to let others do your work 😉” – Robin.
Colour blindness really doesn’t make your work harder? Well, due to the use of colour codes, Robin is actually making his work a lot easier and it doesn’t really happen a lot that his “handicap” influences his work. “Handicap” is a heavy word, but sometimes it does feel accurate, according to Robin. For example, he recently had an assignment in which there were about 20 colour gradations in one shape. Then he just called a colleague…
Colour blindness in “regular” life
Outside from work, Robin is barely “bothered” by his handicap. He learned how to live with it, so he has his own tricks to get through life. Videogames are still tough… Especially in the past, when publishers didn’t take colour-blind people into account and separated teams from each other with the colours red and green. Apparently, friends would ask him why he killed them in the game. Robin would think that they were his enemies because he couldn’t separate the colours…
Fortunately, these days, colour blind people are increasingly taken into account in video games and it is less and less common that he is inhibited by being colour blind and now can happily kill his friends intentionally.
New inventions for colour-blind people make Robin curious, but he is still very skeptical. Like the glasses for colour-blind people in the United States of America. You see videos of people breaking down, saying that a world opens up for them when they wear such glasses. For the first time in their lives, they see colour. But he doesn’t really trust it yet. “It’s America, huh… The fact that they haven’t arrived in the Netherlands yet also says something. We, as down-to-earth Dutch people, may look at it a little bit more realistically. Too bad. If I had the chance to try them I most definitely would.”
A tip Robin gives in to admit to and to accept colour blindness. “You’re not the only one with this handicap and life is still as much as fun, with or slightly less colour. And perhaps the most important tip: “Add some colour to your life, it only takes a while.”