R255 G95 B162

Reason and emotion. Connect two ends with a chromatic metaphor.

 

But what color is it?
Appearance is important, too, that’s how it is said and that’s how it is done.
Bezalel in the Bible receives directions to build a perfect ark with golden decorations and details; Buddhist mandalas contain the essence of the world with color atoms, each public representation requires a performance to be carefully constructed with feeling and passion. This applies to all rites, whether they are religious, civil or sports there is no difference, Athens claimed the beauty and the exposure and visibility of the best, the perfect human being. Every culture, every anthropology, every outward manifestation always requires to be represented.
There is no expression of human feeling to value a moment of life which does not provide for an aesthetic dimension where communication passes through the attention to details, with this its implementation. Big or small, a pyramid or a tribal mark on the body. But is a color enough to enhance identity? May it be the meaning of a story? Try to believe: but how?
Let’s say that doing it it is a good game that we can use to tell how.
What is this cliché? It is a saying of dialectal origin, an expression that spurs, which suggests that you should not stand there waiting, or better, get busy and do not wait for things to happen by themselves. And if what you’re trying to do does not happen, what you tried to do is there, then it might happen that something occurs later, but you have already done something anyway, you have thrown the seed. By doing that you did a good practice, that of the project, testing, verification, asking for continuity between the steps and the return on yourself to review and improve gradually what you did. The practice of the risk, you do and then you undo, and maybe from one thing another is born, not what you expect, but it is the result of a process in which there was also another knowledge. And the designer knows that he always starts from something that is already there, it is easier to proceed by imitation, but when a new thing should be done, you make attempts in interpretations and verifications of the variants, steps that should be gradually verified and validated to make other steps. The design is the ability to see beyond, to look ahead, to try and cause short circuits to produce or try to produce new things, new feelings, new applications. All of this is done by putting in a new light the things you already know, moving your point of view.
In this case, while talking about color the thesis was simple, but to be verified. Is it possible to build an identity system based on only one color? Not for a multinational company or for a client, but for us, who from the brand we made our job. And if you want to do it, what is the right color for us?
A branding studio works on the idea of identity, on its Topoi, on the conditions of the context, and on communication and the promise it intends to support.
And what is Carmi e Ubertis? On what values, attributes, pillars is it founded?
Is it male or female? Evolutionary, innovative or revolutionary? Reason or emotion? Art or technique? Carmi e Ubertis has a method, follows a process, adopts a brand model that follows a path that is always border-line, but always practical, concrete, realistic. It works on the paradox, on the logical contrast, presumptuously we can say that it combines the Profane with the Sacred, but it does it with humility. Like a baker who, with his hands in the mixture, every time creates a tasty and fragrant form of food that most of all gives us back the dimension of Mother Nature and the satisfaction of the need of the species to which we belong, to feed ourselves.
What is the color that can try to do this synthesis between opposites? Is there any possible chromatic metaphor for everything?
The light is what we can see of the physical dimension of the electromagnetic waves, it is what the eye perceives. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, we perceive its lengths ranging from 380 to 770 nanometers. Around us the physical bodies receive light and absorb a part of it, all that is reflected is physiologically interpreted by our organs and becomes in our daily life what we call color. It is a visible and visual attribute that characterizes things; the leaves are green, fire is red and Ferrari is red (but with a yellow horse). Color theory is fascinating, it has to do with anthropology, with chemistry, heraldry, food. With the whole humanity. In 1671 Newton used the concept of spectrum, appearance, to show how the colors were aligned along an optical sequence that would appear if a ray of light should pass through a prism. He had empirically shown that white light included different wavelengths. Now we know that the visible spectrum includes the waves ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, and it includes the essence of the colors that we can see, but not all.
Over time many scientists, scholars, philosophers looked for the best color representations, they created solids of different kinds, shapes and patterns, measurements and representations that included the possible variants of saturation, tone and chromatic value; to find the many browns, or reds, or the many grays that are not visible in the spectrum. But first of all we should consider Goethe, who takes into account an aspect in contrast to Newton and fundamental for all color theories, the value of the dark, of the black as opposed to the light, and as a crucial element of composition.
In all this there is one thing we are interested in, as an identity value in Carmi and Ubertis, and it is precisely the identification of a color missing in the spectrum of Newton. Something that has not been revealed yet, but that is going to be revealed. One of the colors we do not find in nature, it is not in the animal world, neither in the vegetable nor in the mineral world. It is in its theoretical expression, nature approaches but it does not wear it. You can build it artificially. This is the paradox we are interested in, we can create a color that we can see, project, that we can name and can make visible, but it does not belong to the electromagnetic spectrum though it is closely linked to it. It combines two extremes, two limits, like the sacred and the profane, reason and emotion. This color can be achieved perceptually joining the head and the tail of the spectrum, the ultra and the infra, the brightest point of red with the brightest point of blue.
It is an extreme red with an extreme blue, a light that is neither male nor female, neither warm nor cold, neither dark nor clear. It is the color that we can choose and that we have chosen. And it is a tribute to Newton who invented the seventh color, he called it indigo, but no one knew what it was, there was the name, but maybe the color was not what Isaac saw, but what he wanted to see ….
Today we have our own color, but we do not know how to call it, it is not a cobalt blue, or a purplish red, or a pea-green. For us it is only the Carmi e Ubertis color. The lowest common denominator of an identity, useful to make ourselves visible, assume a code, track our recognizability. An object that can be remembered but not a brand, an attribute of Carmi e Ubertis, which founds symbolically our brand.

Pantone Pastel Neon 812C
Rgb 225/95/162
Cmyk 0/75/0/0
HSB 335/63/100

“We do not think enough over the fact that a language is only symbolic and figurative and that it expresses the objects not immediately but only by reflection “(J. W. Goethe – The theory of colors – Il Saggiatore “the Assayer”)

Elio Carmi