The case for monochrome
Why this brand stays black and white, which brands the discipline actually suits, and the honest, slightly personal reason it started that way.
We wrote a defense of black and white a while back, mostly about discipline. This is the other half of the argument, the half about what monochrome is actually for.
Reserved color
Start with a correction: monochrome isn’t the absence of color. It’s reserved color. A black-and-white brand is a stage with the house lights down, and everything that walks onto it arrives glowing. When a merch drop lands in this shop, it’s the loudest thing in the room. When a featured project shows up on our homepage, the client’s palette is the only palette present, which means the client is the brightest object on the property. That’s not modesty. That’s staging. Galleries paint the walls white and theaters paint them black for the same reason, and nobody accuses either of lacking imagination.
Since we added a light mode, this site does both. Dark by default, lights up if you flip the sun in the corner, and in either room the work keeps every drop of the color. The walls change. The staging doesn’t.
We’d rather be the room than compete for the spotlight in it.
Worth saying plainly: this isn’t advice for everybody. Monochrome suits brands whose work carries the color (studios, builders, galleries, craftspeople, anyone whose output walks on stage wearing its own clothes). A cereal brand should not take this advice. A kids’ media company needs warmth the way we need restraint. The palette should match the job, and our job is making other things look like themselves, as clearly as possible.
The personal part
This brand has never pretended its convictions arrived by committee, so here’s the honest origin.
Our founder Robbie is red-green colorblind. In his early days shooting photo and video as @therobbiehall, he leaned in a particular direction without entirely choosing to: toward contrast, light, texture, and timing, the things that survive when hue is unreliable. Nobody hands you that as a style guide. Your eyes just quietly write one for you, and by the time you notice, it’s how you see. He’ll be the first to say it’s not an excuse, and it isn’t the whole explanation either. But it trained an instinct for what an image is doing underneath its color, and that instinct is load-bearing in everything Colony makes.
There’s a standard piece of branding advice that says don’t put too much of yourself into the company. Keep distance. Build something that could survive without you. It’s reasonable advice and we didn’t take it. Colony started from one person’s convictions and habits of seeing, and then other people chose to build on top of them, which is the whole colony idea anyway. A brand with an actual person inside it behaves differently than one assembled from reference boards. It has opinions it can’t fully justify. It keeps rules past the point of convenience. It stays black and white for year after year while every trend cycle whispers that a little gradient never hurt anyone.
The whisper is wrong, for us. The discipline is the identity. And the one splash of orange that shows here and there on this site is the exception that keeps the rule honest: one color, rationed like it costs something, because it does.
Everything else stays black and white. Color is welcome here anytime. It just has to be brought by the work.
