ABSTRACT
In a 2002 article, Gunther Kress and I outlined a social semiotic theory of colour. It ended with a section on colour schemes. As we were writing, we had begun to sense that, today, colour schemes are perhaps more important to think about than individual colours. The final paragraph of our article captured the essence of our emerging social semiotic approach to colour schemes (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2002):
Colour schemes, and the colours that belong to them, make reference to grammar (that is, to regularities), to the social in the form of discourses and their arrangements in ideological form. Yet … they are taken up differently in different contexts, where, in combination with the specifics of the site of appearance and the way they are combined with other modes, they realize different meanings, different uses, and distinctly different ideological positions.
(p. 366) Although I normally do not comment on Gunther’s and my individual contributions to our various writings, I will on this occasion make an exception. These formulations bear the mark of Gunther’s ideas as they developed over the years—the qualification of the term “grammar,” the use of “the social,” the focus on “the specifics of the sites of appearance”—and they have deeply influenced our ideas about colour and colour schemes.