Here’s Looking at Hue

Conrad Crespin

Here’s Looking at Hue is a visual blog looking at people, objects, interiors and nature. As the title of the blog suggests colour imagery is sorted in rainbow hues. I like the diversity of the imagery and the visual compositions of photographs of lamps, swimming pools and fashion models. There’s a nice range between illustration and photography with full artistic credit shown for further explorations. This blog’s theme is seemingly a simple idea, but could potentially become much more complex with further subject divisions and colour categories. Here, we see a tantalising glimpse of such things—showing us how alluring and unexpectedly colour impacts us and enhances meaning in visual communication.

Colour is the first thing that we are able to perceive when we are looking at things. Here’s looking at Hue is a play on the film dialogue from Casablanca (1942).

Ilsa: I can’t fight it anymore. I ran away from you once. I can’t do it again. Oh, I don’t know what’s right any longer. You have to think for both of us. For all of us.
Rick: All right, I will. Here’s looking at you, kid.
Ilsa: [smiles] I wish I didn’t love you so much.

Thinking of this site with reference to Casablanca, it made me reconsider my first impressions of the image placement. I would have placed them in terms of colour value. Whereas at present they have been individual, carefully considered and passionately placed, they may be a little haphazard, but there’s a spark there! Simply put; this site is a dialogue between colour and style.

I thought it would be interesting looking at colours in google images to compare with the visual selections made on Here’s Looking at Hue. Was there a need for a site like this? I was greatly surprised by the results, considering that I use google images a lot for visual research. The search for yellow for example overall was a primary yellow. There was little to no variation between cadmium yellows to lemon yellows, as seen by the thumbnail images. The colour searches for red and blue produced the same result showing little variance from primary red, same too with the blue. Google images lacked the subtle varieties of a single colour, the blog did illustrate colour very elegantly in both colour hues and choice of image.

Also using google images searching three times for red, yellow and then blue visually didn’t inspire much at all, in comparison to the range of hues and stylish imagery on the blog with the same subheadings. The imagery was just so stereotypical of the colour showing; red roses, red football shirts, blue moons and the blue planet earth and yellow ducks. What was interesting was seeing popular culture additions, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Red Dwarf’s sci-fi logo, and Taylor Swift’s album titled Red, and the iconic design cover of the Yellow Pages directory, but these didn’t fit with the blogs visual aesthetic. Using Google images initially proved most unsuccessful, which made the blog undoubtedly more worthwhile. Google images performed better with more description, such as red nature, ideally, you need to be even more specific than that.

Exploring individual colours through; hue, saturation and value by looking at objects and such, simplifies the subject matter itself, creating an intensity that sometimes feels a little unreal, a distraction to our normal colour vision. The text is minimally featured, most images are purely pictorial, freely enabling the viewer to create meaningful associations, at present it merely touches the surface. A worthy bookmarkable site that I’m keen to see grow, seeing how colour affects the context of the imagery and us the user interacting with it—with strong psychological, and even maybe physiological effects. What a great blog theme! Here’s looking at you, kid.

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HERE'S LOOKING AT HUE