The Rules

#7 - A Simple Solution

Rule #7: “Every problem has a simple solution.” 1

If it seems there is no simple solution to a problem, that means the solution is yet to be found. Only a shortsighted mind that is bound to overcomplicate things, is burdened to block itself in a dead-end of a thought process. Trust me, even seemingly unsolvable problems have a solution. Here is an example.

No human is perfect. I am colorblind. How it has happened and how do I live with it is a different story. However, I’ll tell you only one thing; there is no color criteria or feature to me while defining the objects around. What color was the car? I would go like: I dunno, VW, a truck, and so on. As you can see, color is not even a definition I would give.

A color is defined only based on its logical premise of being there. For instance: the grass is green, the trees are brown.

As a part of my daily work, I communicate with interior designers. Occasionally I would email them with a request to slightly move a blue ceiling access door a couple of inches away. We all know that designers use peculiar colors on drawings.

Task: “What color is the ceiling access door?” 2

Look at the picture below with a 500mm access door depicted in the center of it. Can you name the color? 500mm ceiling access door

Solution:

If you are using Mac OS you can search for the “Digital Color Meter” application. The app converts any color on the screen into RGB values. Digital Color Meter App

Open the app. With its help you can point and pick the color the designer was using, and convert it into RGB values. 3

Color-Meter

As you can see the “Digital Color Meter” application gave us the following values: R: 3, G: 252, B: 254.

What does that even mean, you’d ask? Essentially, the displayed color was broken down into three colors: red, green, blue. With assigned values to each of them.

What do I do next? The next step is to convert computer language into human language. I googled a website that helps to do that. It allows you to type the values in, and as a result, it returns a proper color name and hue. Color Name

Now we know with a degree of confidence that the color name we were looking for was “Aqua” or simply “Blue”.

I am emailing the designer with the following request: “Please move the “aqua” access door ten inches east.”

  1. Originally created and published in Feb 2010 ↩︎

  2. I just realized that it’s a lesser problem in North America since the tradition of black & white drawings is still present. However, over the past ten years, I have seen drawings prepared in color too. ↩︎

  3. More about on RGB can be found in the RGB color model wiki article. ↩︎

#problem #solution