Colour design (色彩設計, shikisai sekkei) is an anime production role distinct from background painting. The colour designer sets the palette for each character, each environment, and each lighting condition across a production, producing reference sheets that the entire animation team works from. Their decisions shape an anime's tonal identity as substantially as the character design.
The colour designer's role
The colour designer works from the character designs and the production's overall art direction to produce two principal documents: a character colour reference sheet, specifying every character's colours under each common lighting condition (daylight, indoor, evening, night, dramatic backlight); and a colour script, specifying the palette range for each scene or sequence of the production. Both documents are reference material the rest of the production refers to constantly.
Lighting variants
A typical character colour reference includes between four and twelve lighting variants of each character. The variants are explicit colour swatches (not a multiplier applied to a base colour) and are selected to preserve the character's recognisable colour identity across different scene lighting. The blue of a uniform in daylight, in indoor fluorescent light, in evening shadow, and in dramatic moonlit silhouette will be four different blues — chosen so that all four read as 'the same blue uniform' to the viewer.
Recognised colour designers
Several individual colour designers have careers prominent enough to be tracked by viewers:
- Michiyo Yasuda — Studio Ghibli's principal colour designer from Castle in the Sky through The Wind Rises; her palette decisions are the foundation of the Ghibli look.
- Naomi Nakano — Kyoto Animation's colour designer on much of the studio's modern catalogue.
- Yukari Goto — colour designer on most of Mamoru Hosoda's films.