Civil War, Color Blindness and Sign Branding

So how does a meeting last night in Harrisonburg, Virginia about Civil War literature connect in with sign colors? Let me explain. I often attend the Shenandoah Valley Civil War Round Table (an informal group of people sharing a common interest in Civil War topics who meet on the second Monday of every other month at 7:30pm at the Rockingham County Administrative complex on Gay Street in Harrisonburg, VA.) I usually go to the meetings with my ophthalmologist friend, Dr. Jim from Westminster Presbyterian Church, who became interested in Civil War history because of his direct ancestors who fought and died in that conflict. Jim goes to every meeting he can all over the place from Richmond to Fredericksburg to Winchester. He has been to Gettysburg more times than I’ve written blogs, and I think his interest in the war will increase after he retires from his medical practice for which I provided a nice pylon sign years ago.

So after last night’s talk featuring Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps” and Stephen Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage,” Dr. Jim and I somehow got into a conversation about color blindness and how many people are affected by the condition. One common color vision defect is called the red-green deficiency, which is mostly a genetic issue and is present in about 8 percent of males and 0.5 percent of females. People with this condition have a difficult time discriminating red and green hues due to the absence of red or green retinal photoreceptors. On my drive home, I passed the new CVS store in our town and noticed the storefront channel letter branding signage is bright red, so I wondered about sign design implications relating to people with color blindness. Lo and behold when I got home and opened Wikipedia there was a whole section on this exact topic. It is so important for an organization’s signage to be consistent from store to store. I guess 8.5 percent of the people in my town may have problems discerning the exact branding color of CVS but since their signs are consistently the same design from store to store, it would be easy for all customers to recognize the CVS brand…color blind or not.

Back to the Civil War, Holiday Signs has helped many of Virginia’s Battlefield Parks and Museums with quality signage, including Pamplin Historical Park in Richmond and The Museum of the Confederacy in Appomattox. If you’re interested in history, I hope you will visit some of the six Civil War National Battlefield Parks and other Civil War battle and historical sites located around Virginia, especially during this special Sesquicentennial period that lasts through 2015. Our speaker told the group last night that when writing his novel about the Civil War in 1895, Stephen Crane used the word red throughout his book to emphasize the bloodshed, injuries, and explosive blasts of war. One good thing about the black and white photography of the day and color blindness is that the tragedies often associated with that particular color during war are a little less graphic.