In September, Jada Schumacher, professor, Communication Design Pathways, spoke at the 2024 International Color Association Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, where she presented her paper “Color, Design, and Poison Dart Frogs.”
The paper elucidates ways that color is foundational in the creative process—from project conception to ideation to implementation and evaluation—and includes findings from Schumacher’s interviews with a diverse group of color professionals (Emmy winners, planet photographers, chromatic designers, pigment specialists, iconic architects, color neuroscientists, and more). In the interviews, Schumacher anchored the conversations around color strategies that poison dart frogs use to signal their toxicity to predators, using that as a jumping off point to compare how color professionals and poison dart frogs employ color to allure, protect, deceive, and evolve.
In addition to teaching and coordinating the Color Studies minor at FIT, Schumacher is founding director of designorange, a materials-obsessed design studio. Her upcoming book, titled Hue, Chroma, and Poison Dart Frogs: How Color Changes Everything, explores color as a catalyst for change.