Raised Eyebrow Blog

Designers like to talk about the language of colours: the way different colours make us feel, the symbols they’re linked to (e.g. purple = royalty, Easter, etc.), and how they relate to each other. Lately I’ve been thinking about green — and today I noticed something about green I hadn’t noticed before: It’s got some serious traction in the cyberpunk world.

This morning I met with a client who is debating the use of green for their website. Green’s a tricky colour, because depending on the shade, it can evoke freshness and vitality or organic earthiness — or if you veer too far into the yellow spectrum, you hit upon tones that get pretty acidic. There are sectors where green is such an obvious choice it’s almost cliche, as our environmentally-focused clients can attest; whereas in healthcare, for instance, there’s resistance to anything smacking of “hospital green” or colours that might hint at sickness.

So I’ve been thinking about finding the right green, something that’s fresh and grassy, maybe a little citrusy, but without too much yellow in it. And then I had one of those odd moments where I was surfing around and caught a curveball, which has sparked a somewhat random thought: Is there a shade of green (or more accurately, a palette of greens) that’s cornered by cyberpunk?

Here’s the image that sparked my imagination:

It’s a portrait of author William Gibson, AKA The Father of Cyberpunk, by Vancouver artist Pia Guerra. (I found the image — and it’s worth clicking through to see it at a larger size — on this amazing website, which includes work by many of my favourite comic book artists, of which Guerra (co-creator of the excellent Y: The Last Man) is one. Apologies if I’m violating any copyright laws here — I’m hoping it’s cool to reproduce it here for the sake of discussion.)

I love this piece. It’s strong and evocative, and it has a beautiful texture to it. And the colours instantly caught my eye, because they feel like perfect Gibson colours. I didn’t know why, at first, but as I sat looking at it, I flashed to the iconic visual from The Matrix: the cascading columns of ASCII characters. (Thanks to Wikimedia for this image.)

The Gibson portrait uses subtler greens, but they are similar enough, especially set against black — and the brushstrokes in the portrait have a downward impetus (especially on the sleeve, coming down from the shoulder) that feels very Matrix-y to me. All of that, of course, is entirely apropos for an image of a writer without whom, arguably, there would be no Matrix movies. (Aside: there’s also a Keanu Reeves link between Gibson & The Matrix, since Reeves starred in the film adaptation of Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic, but that’s neither here nor there.)

So I got to thinking about green as colour-code for high-tech. There’s an obvious explanation (if my thesis holds water), which is that at least for those of us of a certain age, our earliest experiences with computers involved a lot of green and black. (See image at left, which comes from sial.org, where there is a remarkable repository of Lode Runner information.) The green-on-black monochromatic computer monitor is mostly gone now, though in my travels today I learned that apparently some people enjoy resetting their monitors to look that way even now. However, its existence coincided with the early days of cyberpunk, so maybe the visual association was established then and has carried through from that point in time.

(A sidebar: I noticed in checking out film stills from The Matrix that many of them share a greenish cast, which is also kind of interesting. Not sure whether that’s relevant to today’s discussion or not, but I’m throwing it out there.)

I’m going to add one more image in here, which might be a stretch, but I love this movie, in all its dystopian-future glory, and it uses green to great effect. Here’s a still from the Akira graphic novel series, from which the film was adapted. The artwork is by Katsuhiro Otomo. It’s another cyberpunk classic… do I detect a theme?

This entry was written by Lauren Bacon on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 3:32 pm, is filed under Design, and is tagged as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.