Tone

I find myself always wanting to learn more about tone and reading Dondis’ short summary of it reminded me of why I enjoy it so much. I agree with Dondis that tone is often an overlooked but vital component of our perception of depth. His simple example of turning a circle into a sphere with just a few lines communicating tone was a great way to demonstrate some of the applications tone has in the world today. For example, compare the two movies “Moana” and “Monsters, Inc.” side-by-side and it is clear that one has a much better lighting engine, which makes the movie much more realistic. Just how tone has applications like this in 2D, I am interested in seeing where tone will take off virtually, and how close we can get to a virtual reality.

Color

Similary to tone, I always enjoy reading or listening about color theory. Color associations play a vital part in most cultures, and extensive studies have been taken to research its impact in different communities. For example, communities with colorful mural artworks experience less crime than communities who don’t. Similarly, communities that installed colorful murals in the community experienced decreases in crime. In short, the researchers found a theory agreeing with the Broken Window Effect on the opposite spectrum. Overall, color plays a much more meaningful role to communicate ideas in more ways than people realize, and Dondis did a nice job touching on both the social and concrete aspects of color.