Tone and Color

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Here is a poster of the Rip Curl Pro Search which is going on right now here in San Francisco at Ocean Beach, which I have been to the past two days and am having the best time of my life. I love this poster and can’t get enough of it. The colors are so perfect for the Sunset district, but I’ll start with tone. Tone is a way in which to convey dimension, as Dondis says. It helps us perceive depth and movement. This is clearly evident in the poster above as we can see a wave just beginning to break and the white water flowing behind it, spraying the ocean. It’s a perfect perfect peak breaking left and right, which usually never happens in SF. We also have a good horizon line as the ocean continues on and the street comes closer to us, as if were are standing on sunset street. Tone, Dondis says, is basically light, “through it, and only through it, we see,” and as you can see, in the distance it is lighter and closer to us, it is darker, maybe signifying that the sun is shining onto the ocean. 

My favorite part is the color. There are many different shades of red, mixed with yellow, orange, and some white for letters and the wave. Yellow usually signifies warmth, and I believe that is exactly what it is signifying here, the nice warm feeling of the sunset. Red is supposed to be emotional, which is perfect because the emotion at the beach today was amazing and everyone was so happy to see the worlds greatest surfers in our back yards. The color fades from red, to dark yellow, to brighter yellow as it fades away, getting warmer and warmer. This poster makes me feel so warm and in love with San Francisco that I don’t think they could have picked a better color choice. Nothing is to bright here, mainly all the same. Nothing is really saturated to much, just different hues of red and yellow. Red and yellow compliment each other very nicely here and I think who ever designed this poster did a fabulous job.