2025
A poster series optimized for visibility under harsh hue lighting.
I collaborated with Elsewhere — a music and arts venue in Brooklyn, NY — on a poster series promoting music production courses through one of their key partners.
Placed in and around bathrooms where customers are likely to idle on their phones, these lead-gen posters provide a QR code for quick registrations and additional information.
The catch? This particular area on location is lit with harsh violet light.
What started out as a straightforward print design project quickly became a deep-dive into optics and a reminder for why I'm glad I listened in high-school physics.
Render of one of the Elsewhere x 343 Labs posters under violet light.
How Optical Physics Informs Print Design
Our eyes are receptive to just a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum — visible light. The way we perceive the color of an object is largely due to the way that object reacts to visible light.
The Visible Light Spectrum
LONG WAVELENGTH
LOW FREQUENCY
SHORT WAVELENGTH
HIGH FREQUENCY
Each color inhabits a unique wavelength along the visible light spectrum, longer on the red end and shorter on the violet. When combined, all of these wavelengths create white light. Sunlight is a natural example of white light. Using a combination of red, green, and blue light, practically all colors in the visible light spectrum can be recreated.
One of the reasons red, green, and blue are often used as primaries (and why RGB is a standard color model) is due to the roughly equidistant locations of these wavelengths along the visible light spectrum. These three wavelengths are the furthest possible distance from one another. In other words, they are the most different and thus the easiest to differentiate for the photoreceptors in our eyes.
The Perception of Color
Different objects and substances absorb and reflect different wavelengths of light. When light is emitted on an abject, the wavelengths that cannot be absorbed are reflected. These are the only wavelengths that are available for our eyes. Hence, the perceived color of an object is whatever wavelength that object cannot absorb.
Consider a green object. When white light is emitted on this object, only the wavelength from the green region of the visible light spectrum returns to our eyes. In other words, the object absorbs red and blue wavelengths and reflects green.
In this way of perceiving color, objects that are white reflect all wavelengths they are provided and black objects absorb all wavelengths, reflecting none.
What if the Light Isn't White?
White light provides an object with all visible wavelengths of light to absorb or reflect. But what if this incident light does not have all wavelengths? What if the incident light is not white?
Let's say we were to emit a violet light on our green object. Violet light is a combination of red and blue light and does not contain any green wavelengths. In this case, the red and blue wavelengths are absorbed, but there is no green to reflect. With no light to reflect, the object practically appears black.
Under white light, the object reflects green wavelengths and appears green. Under violet light, the object receives no green wavelengths to reflect and appears black.
Once the green wavelength is added to the mix of incident light, the object reflects this wavelength and appears green to the viewer.
Redefining The Visible Light Spectrum Under Violet Light
Our perception of color changes when objects are exposed to light that is not white — that is, light where certain wavelengths are left out. Colors are created through combining varying degrees of primary colors. Without one of the primaries such as green, our perception of color becomes severely limited.
Take a look at what happens to primary and secondary colors when the incident light changes from white to violet.
Many of the colors that rely on a combination of green and another color lose the ability to reflect green. For example, yellow objects reflect a combination of red and green light. Without green, the yellow object appears practically red.
The limitations caused by changing the incident light from white to violet are even more noticeable when applied to the entire visible light spectrum. This, in fact, emulates an extreme case of color blindness known as deuteranomaly, where one's photoreceptors have limited sensitivity to green.
Designing for Violet Light
Given the effect of violet incident light on color perception, designing signage for such lighting becomes tricky. As with any layout, essential information needs to be clear and legible. The limited, more homogenous color palette that results from violet lighting means fewer opportunities for high contrast.
This is where black and white come to the rescue. Since white reflects all wavelengths, it will appear to be the same color as the incident light — in this case, violet. Black absorbs all wavelengths, so it will continue to appear black. This provides a few additional combinations for higher contrast.
A crude way to quickly preview artwork without green light is to use an app that allows you to separate an image into RGB channels, like Adobe Photoshop. Turning off the green channel will roughly emulate how the image would appear if no green light was being reflected back to our eyes.
The Channels panel in Photoshop allows the user to quickly turn off a primary channel — in this case, green.
This also allows you to pick colors from the resulting image and run them through a contrast checker like Coolors.co to simulate the perceived contrast of colors under violet light.
The Elsewhere x 343 Labs Poster Design
Starting with just a small set of vector assets and typefaces, the styles used in the poster design were extrapolated mainly from the Elsewhere website.
The first set of posters for the Elsewhere x 343 Labs partnership promotion.
The first step in the design of these posters was to find color combinations that were on brand and provided maximum contrast under violet light. One way to do this was to think of the amount of green in a color as black. In other words, colors that relied on a combination involving green would appear darker under violet light.
The secondary, more traditional layout for the Elsewhere x 343 Labs partnership promotion.
Using this principle, the two final sets of posters are on-brand under daylight, and optimized for visibility under violet light. Their success as a series relies on keeping a consistent layout and typography treatment while varying the primary color scheme. With the posters placed at about eye-level, the QR code placed at the bottom allows for easier scanning.
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