the colours of sound

Hi all!

So the last blog post for this unit... I had better make it a good one....

My choice of colours for the body of my product has been dictated by the design and its environment. My sound measuring device is wall mounted and has two sections on either side where lights illuminate at different levels of sound to alert workers near by. I wanted these lights to stand out so they could be easily seen my anyone in the workshop/factory. This meant that the body of my design could not be a bright colour, say yellow for example. This would make the lights harder to view. I need a contrast of colours in my design. 

Consider traffic lights. The traffic light unit is black so that the colour of the lights can be read by drivers no matter what is behind the traffic light. I did not want my device to be black or white, as i think these colours are a bit extreme. I decided to settle for a darker grey which would provide the level of contrast that I wanted for my device.

I have chosen red, orange and green as the colours for the lights because they are easy to understand. Green refers to good levels of sound, orange refers to ok levels of sound, and red refers to damaging levels of sound.

Thanks for reading all semester!

Matt Harding