ColorChords

In The Art of Color, Johannes Itten professed a belief in the relationship between the twelve musical notes and the twelve colors of his color wheel. Like the twelve musical notes, the twelve colors are arranged in steps. Each note is a defined by the surrounding notes; each color is defined by its adjacent colors. Musical notes can be combined to form sonically harmonic chords; colors can be combined to form visually harmonic chords.

ColorChords is an ongoing personal project—a way for me to express my love of guitars and graphic design. Shown here are prototypes for a series of designs based on familiar musical chord progressions.

Goethe wrote that red “conveys an impression of gravity and dignity, and at the same time grace and attractiveness.” With that in mind, I assigned a red background to the C ColorChord. The colors of the background and finger dots for the C design are expressed in split-complements—red is the base color, and yellow-green and blue-green define the finger dots. The base colors for the C, F and G ColorChords use the same split-complements: red, yellow-green, and blue-green. As in the C ColorChord, the finger dots in the F and G designs are also split-complements: the base of the F ColorChord is yellow-green, with red-orange and red-violet finger dots; the base of the G ColorChord is blue-green, with finger dots in orange and red.

This is an ongoing project. I have a set of templates that can be colorized using any color palette I wish, based on a variety of color theory principles.

Below, examples of templates that can be colorized in a variety of ways, using different color palette concepts—monochromatic, analogous, complementary, temperature, simultaneous contrast, historical, thematic.

The ColorChord cards for tenor guitar (below) are a fun way learn chords and chord progressions, and simultaneously play with colors. These cards are small, about half the size of standard business cards, and come as a set. I use these cards to experimentally map out chord progressions by arranging them in different ways according to color relationships—this experimental process often results in surprising results.