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PLASA Seminar Looks At Color’s Impact on Designs and Emotions

Posted on January 26, 2015

aurora1SUNRISE, FL – The human eye contains millions of cone cells for detecting color — and Jim Hutchison hopes to tingle each and every one of them in his upcoming LED Color: The Psychological Experience seminar at PLASA Focus Orlando from 2-3 pm Tuesday February 17. Hutchison, the customer engagement manager at CHAUVET Professional and Iluminarc, will take visitors on a colorful tour showing the effect that different colors and combinations of colors have on human thought and emotion. Along the way, he’ll share some insights on ways LDs can utilize the influential power of color to create more impactful designs.

“I’ve geared this course to show lighting designers what it means to be able to use color on a level that gives their designs even more depth and a greater ability to convey the story they want to tell,” said Hutchison. “It’s obviously very important that, as designers, we spend time talking about the pixel pitch and batching of LED fixtures and look at their mathematical data and photo metrics, but that’s still only part of the equation. What we also need to do is put ourselves in the audience’s seat to see how we can better tell a story to them and suspend their disbelief more effectively.  This course will offer advice on how you can do that by having your audience experience different colors of light.”

Some of the examples of color influence that the seminar will explore include the power of red to increase breathing and digestion rates, how heavy yellow hues evoke “an almost a blissful confusion,” and how blues and greens engender states of calmness.  “Individual colors are potent influencers,” said Hutchison. “Then, when you use them in combination with one another, you pump up their power even further. Our seminar will cover some proven examples of this color synergy.”

Hutchison will be relying on a collection of CHAUVET Professional COLORado Batten Quad-9 fixtures to provide vivid examples of LED rendered colors in action during the seminar. “We’re going to fill that room with heavy hues and induce some color fatigue in everyone’s cone cells for the sake of art,” he said. “It should be fun and I promise that anyone who attends will never see color in quite the same way.”