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Brand New Color

The fact that your car is tinted a subtle silver or that 
your running shoes have vibrant orange stripes flaring up their sides is hardly a design afterthought.

color beatrice santiccioli book gilber paper monkey

Indeed, the shades of products are considered every bit as carefully as their shapes. Color designer and graphic artist Beatrice Santiccioli, a renowned expert in her field, whose client list includes Swatch, Herman Miller, Biomega, Gilbert Paper, and Nike, talks about what it means to be professionally awash in hues.

Do clients approach you with certain colors in mind for their projects or are you presented with a blank canvas?

Generally, when I start working on colors, the product itself is already to a good level of development. Most of the clients I work with have such a strong vision and idea of the market already that I don’t have to show them images—it’s more about discussion.

How does that discussion translate into a palette, say with your work for Gilbert Paper?

Besides using samples from color companies like Toyo or Pantone, I also like to mix my own hues—to mix gouache or use dyes in water and vials. And for this project, when I was asked to design colors for a paper company, I definitely couldn’t bring paper samples from other companies! So I had reason to do a very basic and more artistic investigation of hues; the first samples were all handmade, as were the hues. Of course, Gilbert Paper was also giving me direction, like their request for a pearlescent finish for some of the paper, which turned out to be the best sellers in the line.

It sounds like you are as much of an artist as you are a colorist.

Well, yes, an artist in the sense that I did a lot of studies in school about color theories and mixing. I studied at the Polytechnic School of Design in Milan and we didn’t have access to computers. It was very manual. So that’s a base of my work, and a very important aspect, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to create hues.

Does your approach to creating colors vary based on your client?

They’re all different projects, because the strategies and the platforms are different. At Swatch, for instance, there are two collections a year and they produce maybe 20 pieces in each collection. Both the colors as well as the graphics were precisely thought out. For example, when we were introducing the scuba watch, we were using beautiful, bright fluorescent color to make it more visible underwater.

Could you talk about your work with Biomega bicycles? That subdued palette is a real departure from your vivid colors for Swatch.

The colors have been designed for the new line of bicycles they just added to their collection. It focuses on city style. So I created a more sophisticated palette in that it’s not about really bright hues and bold colors, but more about warm, muted colors and intense tones. These are bicycles from Denmark, and [they are] based on the culture of the cities there, where people ride to and from work—that’s what drove the development of the new palette. They are deep colors, like a beautiful dark suit.

Clearly, you’ve created shades for a wide variety of media. Does your work vary from discipline to discipline?

It does, because you think about the usage, the final application, and the diverse meanings that people give to what they build with paper or the value they place on a bicycle. Plus, the way the color is presented in each process is different. For example, with paper, the quality of the paper itself is another temperament and voice that is added to the project. You can’t avoid the porosity or the flatness or the shine of paper. All these aspects are like little hints of personality.

It seems that you view the world from the perspective of color.

Yes, I’m very visual. When I look at colors, it’s like a language that I can speak easily. I learn it, I tune it—it’s like when you know how to sing well; it’s very spontaneous. If I were to have a table in front of me of things that are all messy and disorganized, the first thing I would do is rearrange everything by color. And I love that.

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