Navigating the world of art and design through a unique lens.
“The three colours of a traffic light are always red, amber, and green. But for me, the red looks more like a ‘danger’ red, and the amber looks a bit like a Fanta red or a sunset red,” says Syahid Isn. I contemplate for a second if I should interject and tell him that the colour of Fanta is typically orange.
Syahid is a primary school art teacher and home baker who creates cookies and elaborate custom-designed cakes for his clients. When a friend asked him to make a cake that looked like a stack of pancakes for his son’s first birthday, he delivered. Syahid, however, inadvertently made them pandan-flavoured pancakes—colouring them green instead of brown. That’s because Syahid, who sometimes struggles to differentiate between brown and green (among other colours), is colour blind.
Colours, Colours, Everywhere
It is easy to overlook colour’s critical role in our daily lives. The colour of the lines on the road—yellow or white—informs road users what they can and cannot do. Reports and PowerPoint presentations often use contrasting colours in pie charts, graphs, and infographics to convey complex information. Colour conveys moods and feelings too; we say others are green with envy, feeling blue, or are red-hot lovers.
A 2008 study showed that in scoring the performance of athletes in Taekwondo, judges have an unconscious bias towards players who wear red rather than blue—scoring players in red higher for identical performances. This, researchers suggest, could be due to red being seen as a more aggressive, dominant colour, or simply more visually striking. But not everyone sees shades of red, green, brown, and blue the same way.
Colour blindness is a relatively common condition, affecting around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. The most common type is red-green colour blindness. A 2008 study of over a thousand teenagers in Singapore found that 5.3 percent of boys were red-green colour-blind. Despite its prevalence, colour blindness often fails to receive as much attention and discussion as its more famous cousin: myopia. Yet, it has real, tangible impacts on those who live with it. Those who are colour-blind might not become electricians, chemists, or pilots. A driver’s license may be out of reach, and even a fun game of Twister can be a highly stressful endeavour. And what about the pursuit of visual arts or design? Surprisingly possible.
Blue Grapes and Green Skies
Both Syahid and 26-year-old Bryan Wu, who works in art direction and graphic design in advertising, learned of their condition in primary school. For Syahid, he knew something was different quite early on. “I am quite creative, so when I would be doing a bit of colouring in art class, I realised I could not find colours. Unless the labels said which colour is which, I could not tell what was yellow and what was blue,” he says.
“My teachers would tell me that my paintings were very strange, that I painted the sky green, and ask why I mixed (the colours) up,” he adds. During a school health check-up, Syahid shared his concerns with the school nurse, who conducted colour vision tests. He was then referred to a specialist who confirmed his colour blindness. “The first thing the doctor told me was that I could not be a pilot, which crushed my dreams. I mean, being a pilot is not something most people end up being, but it really crushed my dreams back then,” he recalls, laughing.
Bryan discovered his condition during a school medical check-up. Presented with Ishihara plates, commonly used in colour vision tests, he couldn’t see the numbers or shapes within the dots. A visit to the specialist confirmed the diagnosis and clarified the quirky colour choices in his artwork. “When I was younger and had to do colouring, I could not differentiate between brown and green. I would have brown leaves and blue grapes. So when mum heard, she was like, ‘Oh, that explains why’,” he says.
The Mechanics of Colour
Here’s how colours work: Electromagnetic radiation within a segment of the spectrum is visible to the human eye. Different wavelengths correspond to various shades of colours. White, associated with light, results from all wavelengths combined. When light hits an object, it absorbs some wavelengths and reflects the rest, which is perceived as the object’s colour. Photoreceptors in our retinas translate the incoming light into electric signals transmitted to the brain, which interprets them as images.
Forced Life Hacks
While not debilitating, being colour-blind and working in roles where colours are essential requires Syahid and Bryan to be extra creative. “When I say let’s use the red colour (in class), and a student says that’s not red, I’ll say, ‘Good job, you were paying attention’,” Syahid explains. When he teaches art, he arranges the colours he can recognise separately or labels them to avoid hesitation. However, this method isn’t foolproof, compelling Syahid to think quickly on his feet when misidentifying colours.
The constant fear of mistakenly using the wrong colour looms large, taking a toll on him. “You just have to be very, very careful when teaching. Some people don’t have to bother, but I need to be especially careful, which can sometimes be bothersome.”
Bryan, who works in digital design, employs various tricks. “One of my hacks is ‘copying’ colour codes from specific colours or shades I want to use from elsewhere, like Google. I also use digital tools like the eyedropper, which allows users to pick colours from various sources. Thank god my job does not require me to physically paint or anything like that.” Friends and loved ones support both Syahid and Bryan in their personal and professional lives. Bryan relies on his girlfriend to help him shop for clothes, preventing mix-ups like picking up a pink shirt while thinking it was grey. Syahid often texts his best friend for assistance in identifying colours, especially when baking.
The Theory of Colour Blindness
There’s a logical explanation for why some see colours differently: our retina contains millions of photoreceptors—cones and rods. Colour vision is mainly attributed to the cones, which can be red-sensing, blue-sensing, or green-sensing. These cones work together to enable us to see the entire colour spectrum. Colour blindness occurs when these cones malfunction.
Deuteranomaly, the most common form of colour blindness found in nearly 5 percent of men, results from green cones not functioning properly. This often leads to difficulty distinguishing between red, yellow, green, and brown. However, having deuteranomaly does not always prevent one from differentiating between green and brown, as both Bryan and Syahid point out. “It depends on where you are and what light you are under. If you put yellow and green beside each other under dim lighting, I might need help. But I can see colours better in natural sunlight,” Syahid explains.
“Lighting is something that really matters,” Bryan adds, noting that artificial yellow light illuminates objects differently from white light.
Art Without Colour
“I was obsessed with arts and crafts as a kid… but being colour blind was part of why I did not pursue art for O levels,” Bryan shares. “I would say it held me back in terms of creativity because anything involving colours is difficult,” he adds. He remembers struggling with assignments during his design course at Singapore Polytechnic.
“One assignment I remember involved recreating the colour wheel, a task I had to rely on friends to complete.” Coincidentally, Syahid vividly recalls grappling with the same task while studying Fashion Design at LASALLE. “Everyone around me was having fun, but I was dying,” Syahid sighs.
In some creative circles, a stigma around being colour-blind persists. When he applied to La Salle, Syahid did not disclose his condition to the interviewer. When asked if he would handle things differently if he were to apply again, he says he probably would not. “It’s a sensitive issue. I really wanted to get in, and I just think it’s something you cannot tell (the interviewer),” he reflects.
Beautiful World, Where Are You?
For Bryan, being colour-blind isn’t an artistic weakness—it’s a strength. “You know how people say that when one sense is diminished, others are heightened? In that way, being colour-blind has made me more sensitive to colour,” he says. I ask him about his biggest takeaway from being colour-blind. “This might sound cheesy, but just treat people nicely,” Bryan replies, recalling a prank from when he was 14, where friends tricked him into believing the grey shirt he wore was orange.
While he initially doubted them, their persistent story led him to question himself, robbing him of his self-confidence. Though Bryan views his condition as a minor inconvenience, he sometimes wishes things were different. “When I go overseas and see beautiful scenery, I wish I could see things differently.”
Syahid faces a similar struggle, recalling an incident where he couldn’t see a rainbow his friend pointed out. “My friends said, ‘Look, there’s a rainbow,’ but when I looked at the sky, I saw nothing,” he says. “The sky is the worst place because the colours are constantly changing. I notice the change, but I see it differently.”
One significant lesson Syahid has learned is that those who are colour-blind do not see things incorrectly or less; they simply perceive them differently—literally. Back in school, when he confided in a La Salle instructor about his condition, she reassured him, “Just pick out what you see. What you see will be different, but that is special.”
