lhs (print) issn 1742–2906
lhs (online) issn 1743–1662
Review
The Language of Colour: An introduction
Theo van Leeuwen
Reviewed by: John A. Bateman
In his latest book, Theo van Leeuwen turns his social semiotic gaze to 'colour'
– and as befitting his social semiotic orientation, in particular to the spe-
cific positioning of colour as a resource for meaning making in social and
cultural contexts. With this move, van Leeuwen argues that less culturally-
embedded views of the phenomenon of colour necessarily fail to do justice to
how colours are created and used within culturally-embedded practices. The
book is primarily intended as a textbook for university or design students and
so combines the central point of cultural embedding that van Leeuwen wishes
to emphasize with a gradual introduction to the various ways in which colour
has been theorized over the years. This generally succeeds very well. The book
is straightforwardly written, with many of its points being made by examples,
and presents an interesting and informative journey through various theo-
retical positions adopted towards colour, ranging from the ancient Greeks,
through Goethe and up to modern times. It also quickly becomes clear that
the title of the book may be somewhat misleading: van Leeuwen shows that
there is no such thing as the language of colour: this would be precisely the
kind of attribution of inherent meanings separated from social context that
the book actually takes considerable pains to deconstruct.
One of the motivations that van Leeuwen raises for the book is that he con-
siders it time to consider colour as a positive contribution to various areas of
meaning making in its own right. A traditional distinction between 'colour'
and 'design' had already been debated in the fifteenth century, according
Affiliation
Bremen University, Germany.
email: [email protected]
©2014, equinox publishing 1–8 doi : 10.1558/6545748635
2 Review
to which the principal locus of meaning making is attributed to design and
colour is left to fill moods and nuances. Van Leeuwen considers his own pre-
vious relative disregard for colour as a relic of this tendency – a relic perhaps
also respected in the publisher's design for the book, which is unfortunately
a relentless grey on grey with figures separated out into their own separate
'colour plate' section in the middle. Such relegations of colour have naturally
also been considered critically over the years and certainly do not fit well with
the practices of today, where colour is commonly a natural component avail-
able throughout the design process – i.e., a resource for meaning making
equal alongside others. Also linked here are various value judgements made
about colour, ranging from requirements of 'purity' of colours for the achieve-
ment of aesthetic quality (Kant) to diametrically opposed positions celebrat-
ing the complexity and exuberance of mixtures and combinations (Derrida,
Kristeva). Van Leeuwen sees social semiotics in general as having erred too far
on the Kantian side, with distinctions such as colour placed as mere expres-
sions of more abstract content (design). One of the intentions of the book is
therefore to document this misbalance and to help establish the consciousness
of the problem that is necessary to correct it.
The book itself is a slim volume, weighing in at just over 100 pages, and
is divided into seven convenient bite-sized chapters well-suited to the read-
ing habits of many of today's students. Each chapter ends with some exercises
or activities, selected to encourage reflection or practice concerning the main
topics raised and, also as suitable for a textbook, there are substantial refer-
ences to previous work and the positions taken; this latter is particularly wel-
come given that this has not always been the case in previous social semiotics
texts. The book also includes a useful glossary of the main concepts and an
extensive index.
The journey begins with van Leeuwen's main concern: establishing the case
for a social semiotics of colour. Chapter 1 accordingly sets out what it means
to adopt a social semiotic approach both in general and in the particular case
of colour. Here the reader learns of three organizing dimensions inform-
ing the social semiotic investigation: first, there are the semiotic resources of
colour themselves, the materials and technologies used in their production;
second, there are the cultural practices within which the uses of colour as a
communicative resource have been developed; and third, there are consid-
erations of semiotic change, as the values and meanings attributed to colour
within changing practices also change. As often emphasized in the works of
van Leeuwen and long-time collaborator Gunther Kress, this reconnection of
the world of pure signification with the materiality of the signs employed is a
central tenet and so naturally reoccurs in most of the individual chapters in
one form or another. It is this that forms their main thrust in correcting the
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preference mentioned above for considering abstract forms rather than valu-
ing material expression as such. Where this takes van Leeuwen in the current
context will become clear below.
Chapter 2 introduces some of the prominent kinds of meanings with which
colours have been attributed: in particular, colour symbolism and colour nat-
uralism. The former is illustrated with examples from the Middle Ages, with
traditional associations between colours and values or ideas – such as the con-
ventional adoption of particular colours for various saints and other biblical
characters in art works or broader associations such as, for example, ‘black’
with ‘death and sin’ and ‘white’ with ‘purity and divinity’ in Western traditions.
Colour naturalism, in contrast, is situated against the backdrop of a loss of
conventional, or semiotic, uses as colour became more of an embellishment, a
way of achieving naturalistic effects, of recapturing the world as it appears to
the eye. Treatments of colour then also came under the purview of science and
methods were explored for measuring and combining colours to more closely
approximate the world seen. Finally, van Leeuwen introduces the reader to
the highly influential treatment of colour developed by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe from 1810. Here colour is attributed with direct sensory effects and is
aligned directly with personality traits. As van Leeuwen convincingly shows
in many quotations in subsequent chapters, this style of giving meanings to
colours is still very much with us today and surfaces in art, in psychological
testing, in interior design, in fashion and many other places besides.
Chapter 3 then begins to consider how colours have been described more
systematically by means of the development of a variety of ‘colour systems’. At
the outset, such systems generally involved exploration of how colours can be
combined to yield other colours and concerned themselves with appropriate
selections of ‘primary’ colours out of which all others might be produced. This
was clearly of a very practical concern in painting but also came subsequently
to support various technological developments, including colour photography
and printing. Van Leeuwen sets out how the currently common intensity-hue-
saturation system developed and shows the differences between the additive
colour system found with light-based media and the subtractive colour system
found in print and other dye or pigment based media. Also discussed here are
some of the other properties that make up our colour perception that draw
more on the materiality of the objects seen, such as texture, translucency and
transparency; these come to play a greater role in Chapter 5, where van Leeu-
wen addresses the materiality of colour in more detail.
Chapter 4 opens up the discussion to consider the naming of colours, both
within natural languages, setting out the widely known results from Berlin
and Kay on colour naming ‘universals’ from the 1960s and the critiques that
have been made of this position, and within artificial systems of colour codes
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of various kinds and naming practices from interior design familiar from
contemporary usage. Throughout the chapter there is a general progression
from the more isolated consideration of names for colours as individual lexi-
cal items that may be associated with given ‘colours’, treating the names more
as labels for an objectively identifiable phenomenon delivered by objective
coding schemes, towards colour terms as attributions of value in particular
cultural practices. Here the colour terms are no longer the red, greens and
blues of basic colour terms but instead take in more expressive formulations
such as Sultry Glance, Sheer Passion, Bright Delight (Dulux paints) or the Prune
Drama Girl, Daring Rose, Wicked Brown of some brands of lipstick. Van Leeu-
wen suggests that all colour terms in fact have origins in such metaphorical
extensions and makes a connection to Lakoff and Johnson’s placement of met-
aphor at the heart of our language abilities (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Here
the essential move is to also consider the naming of colours as a metaphorical
response to physical experience, i.e., as experiential metaphors. Just as Lakoff
and Johnson see much of language use arising out of a re-coding of physi-
cally embodied interaction with the environment, van Leeuwen suggests that
colour naming practices are similarly a process of such experiential re-coding.
Chapter 5 is then the theoretical core of the book, building substantially on
earlier joint work with Gunther Kress (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2002). Here
van Leeuwen proposes what he terms a ‘parametric theory of colour’, similar
in vein to his proposed treatment of voice quality (van Leeuwen, 2009). The
parametric approach is intended to redress some of the imbalance towards
views of colour separated from materiality by offering a coding scheme that
also includes dimensions of material variation of the kind mentioned in Chap-
ter 3, such as luminance and texture. To introduce the parametric view, van
Leeuwen leads the reader into the traditional linguistic notions of distinc-
tive features, which he somewhat unfortunately characterizes inaccurately as
‘binary’ instead of simply ‘digital’ or ‘discrete’. Then, in contrast to discrete
coding systems, he proposes a related, ‘non-distinctive’ feature description
made up of several simultaneously available dimensions, each varying con-
tinuously rather than discretely. Descriptions of actual material occurrences
of colours in a broader sense are then to be placed against their respective
values for these dimensions. This is also seen as a way of characterizing entire
sets of colours that may be grouped into colour schemes by harmony (of some
dimensional values) or contrast.
Chapter 6 returns to some of the applications that might be made of this
account and considers the use of colours in art and architecture. Here van
Leeuwen focuses on what he describes as the ‘return of colour’ to modern art
and the ways in which colours are motivated and described in descriptions of
buildings and interior design.
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Finally, Chapter 7 discusses colours in ‘contemporary life’, focusing on
colour as a marker of identity and as a resource for constructing textuality
through colour cohesion and contrast in document layouts and typography. In
order to function at all to signify identity, attention is drawn here to the sup-
porting normative discourses in which socially sanctioned ‘authorities’, such
as fashion experts, designers, artists, etc., state or enact not only particular
colour choices but also the meanings that are to be ascribed to those choices.
The chapter, and hence the book, ends with some brief conclusions reached
concerning the changing role of colour over time and the meanings that it
takes on.
Over its seven chapters the book therefore succeeds in taking the reader
through a range of basic accounts of colour and the ways in which colour has
been described and used over time. This gathers together useful foundations
for reflecting on the phenomenon of colour and its social semiotic construc-
tion. It is also clearly an introductory book, however, and its main contribu-
tion is in providing a starting point for talking about colour in its own right.
For my own students I would prefer something a little more analytic, although
I am sure that few of them would thank me for it. The examples and exercises
would no doubt lead to discussion, but the analytic framework presented can
only support the first few steps in that discussion. The exercises also seem to
favour more of a design background than, for example, a semiotic or linguis-
tic background, with many practical tasks involving selecting colour schemes
and motivating their use. Apart from the parametric framework developed
in Chapter 5, much of the book's discussion is couched in terms of example
quotations of how people have talked about colour, which is certainly consis-
tent with the social semiotic goal of describing actual practices but does not
always lead us far away from surface considerations. In that sense, rather little
changes over time: the discussion of colours as receiving many different kinds
of values appears to be a constant. Semiotically this phenomenon is not con-
sidered with any particular degree of generality and there are a few places in
the book where the foundations of the account appear to be in need of further
development.
The clearest area where this is the case is precisely that highlighted by social
semiotics itself as a concern in need of renewed attention: the materiality of
semiotic resources. Here the model relied upon is that of Kress and van Leeu-
wen (2001) in which several relevant distinctions are drawn, the central one
for current purposes being that between ‘mode’ and ‘medium’. Mode is char-
acterized as the semiotic aspect; medium as the materiality. Attention to the
materiality of semiotic resources is consequently a focus on 'medium' in Kress
and van Leeuwen's terms and as set out in the current book at the beginning
of Chapter 3. The parametric system of colour proposed in Chapter 5 is then
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explicitly situated as a description of medium rather than of mode. Van Leeu-
wen draws attention in the conclusion of the book to the problematic divide
between, on the one hand, semiotic accounts, that have tended to describe
modes abstracted from their materiality, emphasizing their systematicity, and
on the other, the actual use of a resource such as colour in society ‘in all its
complexities, and with all its contradictions’ (p. 98). This is the task that van
Leeuwen picks out particularly for social semioticians (his emphasis).
There are certainly going to be many ways in which these complexities can
be explored and positions will differ; the looser, more ethnographic approach
taken by van Leeuwen will appeal to many and is also readily intelligible for
beginners. Personally I retain too much of the urge to systematicity, however,
to follow van Leeuwen’s proposal that we distinguish systematic modes from
rather more unsystematic media and then focus on the latter. And, indeed,
this division is not convincingly made in the book at hand. The discussion is
in fact at its weakest when modes are considered. It is, for example, stated that
modes can be organized according to the Hallidayan metafunctions; yet the
only example of a mode description that the book does present, a network of
colour distinctions organized around distinctive features (chromatic vs. non-
chromatic, blue vs. red vs. yellow, etc.), patently is not (Figure 5.1 discussed
on p. 60). A claim that a resource can be used in ways that achieve functions
that may be classified according to the Hallidayan metafunctions is by itself
largely vacuous, as almost any resource certainly can: the important distin-
guishing notion that metafunctions have consequences for the internal organi-
zation of a semiotic resource falls by the wayside. Moreover, divorcing media
(in Kress and van Leeuwen’s sense) from modes naturally leaves a problem for
any semiotic account that wishes to discuss meanings. Van Leeuwen's solution
is to consider Lakoff and Johnson’s experiential metaphor as the key: certain
combinations of parametric values characterizing the medium (material) are
proposed as experiential sources of chains of metaphorical meaning making.
The material is by this means supposed to take up meanings of its own autono-
mously from a possible participation in modes, as argued rather more fully in
van Leeuwen (2009: 70–71) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2001: 74–78). Thus,
we learn here that ‘the meaning potential of lightness … is just that, “light-
ness”’ (pp. 58–59) and this can then be taken up in religious works as ‘divine
light’ or in interior decorating as ‘peaceful’ or ‘tranquillity’. But this is just
where the task of describing (systematically) the various (and possibly mutu-
ally contradictory) semiotic modes that are employed in such religious or inte-
rior decorating discourses begins; we cannot avoid that task if our goal is to
account for meanings, even social semiotic meanings. I doubt the existence of
a single ‘semiotic mode’ of colour just as much as that of a single ‘language’ of
colour – but this does not necessarily restrict an account to considering only
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materiality. In short, there is evidently far more groundwork to be done here
and so those who might use the book as a textbook would probably be well
advised to consider their own positions before the student discussions start!
There are also a few areas where it might have been interesting to have a little
more information provided. For example, some more current views of colour
as a phenomenon from analytic philosophy or cognitive science (e.g., in terms
of the ‘conceptual spaces’ developed by Gärdenfors, 2000) may have provided
additional conceptual clarity for framing questions, particularly concerning
parametric systems, while perception, as in the perception of colour, is hardly
mentioned at all. The omission of perception is a pity since this would interact
well with the discussion of technologies of colour. The differing sensitivities
of the light detectors in the eye according to the frequencies and intensities
they respond to present a revealing angle on just how embodied (and species-
specific!) our perception of colour, and of the technological devices we have
developed for presenting colour, is (cf. e.g., Gärdenfors, 2000: 13 and the ref-
erences cited there). A further short chapter on this would have rounded out
the volume nicely and may perhaps have presented a more appropriate intro-
duction of the important notion of Gibson's (e.g., 1977) affordances. These are
mentioned in Chapter 5 (p. 59) in quite the muddiest paragraphs of the entire
book: the essential claim of affordances that perception works directly in terms
of uses, not in terms of perception of properties, goes missing or is suppressed
– the reader would do better here to follow through the discussion in Kress
and van Leeuwen (2002: 355–360) to see what is meant. The position of colour
as a resource for making discriminations in the environment could have been
strengthened here considerably as well as perhaps providing a stronger lowest
rung on the ladder of experiential metaphor, where there is clearly very much
more to be said.
Book reviewed
van Leeuwen, T. (2011) The Language of Colour: An Introduction. London:
Routledge Publishing Co.
References
Gärdenfors, P. (2000) Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gibson, J. (1977) The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw and J. Bransford (eds) Perceiving,
Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, 62-82. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of
Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
8 Review
Kress, G. and van Leeuwen, T. (2002) Colour as a semiotic mode: Notes for a grammar
of colour. Visual Communication 1 (3): 343–368. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470357202
00100306
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live by. Chicago, IL: Chicago Univer-
sity Press.
van Leeuwen, T. (2009) Parametric systems: The case of voice quality. In C. Jewitt (ed.) The
Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis, 68-77. London: Routledge.
