Designing While Colour Blind: An Architect's Story

At age six, my pediatrician informed me that I was colour blind — but I had no idea what that really meant.

The first time I felt shut out of colour

Over the years, I made some interesting colour choices when putting together my outfits. Then, in ninth-grade art class, my teacher regretfully informed me that the “green” paint I had mixed from other hues was not really green at all. Perhaps, she suggested, I could focus on charcoal drawings or other media where contrast mattered more than colour.

I already loved pencil and ink, so I was not completely crushed. But I did feel as though I had been robbed. I buried that feeling deep within myself. At the time, I was not equipped to discuss the emotional fallout — or the impostor syndrome that would nip at my heels for most of my life whenever colour was involved.

“I loved art and designed objects, but I believed there was a level of beauty and nuance I would never be able to witness.”

Before I found some relief through EnChroma lenses years later, I did not understand how much shame and resignation I carried around my design eye, my relationship with colour and my creative output. Throughout my education and career, I worked with colour in ways I hoped professors, employers and clients would deem passable — because anything beyond “passable” felt unobtainable.

Finding my way into architecture

I was fortunate that architecture found me, because I did not know how I could support myself financially through art. The industry standard of technical black-and-white drawings gave me a way to build a career in the applied arts.

Even so, I had to become remarkably creative in the ways I coped with colour, first as a student and later as a professional.

Then I tried EnChroma

My wife told me about glasses that might help. I hemmed and hawed at first because I thought they could not possibly make a difference. Eventually, we attended an event with other colour-deficient people and their loved ones. About six of us tried the glasses at the same time.

At first, nothing seemed dramatically different. Then we began noticing individual parts of our field of vision that looked decidedly changed. I remember seeing striking reddish rust stains on the side of a light-coloured building. With the glasses off, those same stains appeared brown and dull.

My entire vision did not suddenly transform. It was more like discovering that countless details had been hiding in plain sight — details I had never known were there.

A world with more depth

For me, the glasses have also changed the way I experience depth — especially in wooded environments with heavy leaf cover. Without them, tree canopies can look flat, a little like the trees in Super Mario Bros. 3.

I notice the difference most in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun’s angles are steeper and the light behaves differently. I physically feel different knowing where I stand within a field of coloured light. The world feels more dimensional — more three-dimensional, if you will.

Seeing the Musée d’Orsay with new eyes

I have been fortunate to visit Paris several times, and my favorite place is the Musée d’Orsay, home to an extraordinary collection of Impressionist art. On a recent trip, I returned wearing indoor EnChroma lenses.

I was blown away by colours and relationships I had never perceived in works by artists such as van Gogh, Renoir and Sisley. I gained a stronger sense of the light they saw. Their paintings felt less like pigment on canvas and more like physical worlds.

There was greater gradation between foreground and background, almost as though I could reach into the depth of field they created. Even my spatial awareness inside the museum felt different because of the way I perceived light and shadow.

Confidence I did not know I was missing

Wearing EnChroma lenses has increased my confidence as a designer and in navigating the world at large. I can now take part in conversations that once felt closed to me, and I feel more secure in my creative decisions.

It is difficult to overstate how much more awake I feel when sensing and moving through my environment. I am grateful to live in a time when support for something so fundamental is possible — and when colour no longer has to feel like a world I can only observe from the outside.

This story reflects one person’s experience. Individual experiences with EnChroma glasses vary. EnChroma glasses are an optical assistive device; they are not a cure for colour blindness.