Why Everyone Needs to Stop Using Red, Green and Blue as the Primary Colours

All of this comes from the fact that human eyes have three types of colour receptors. Only humans possess these three types of colour receptors. Every other animal has more. Dogs have two, cats have four, frogs have five, mantis shrimps have sixteen, dragonflies have twelve, among many many more. Everyone knows that you can’t just slap on your colour palette for your alien species and call it a day. I’ve seen several just copy and paste the standard 3-colour system we have for humans and maybe just change up the hues. That’s not good enough, you can’t just make lazy colour palettes for your aliens. <br><br>So that’s the science. Now for some recommendations. First off, you need to decide on how many colour receptors your aliens have, and what spectrum they can see. For instance, many animals have extended into the ultraviolet side of the spectrum, and many others have extended into the near infrared. You can extrapolate from the colours of our spectrum, like reds and oranges being on the infrared end, and blues and violets on the ultraviolet end. Then you can decide how much information they’d be able to discern from their colour vision, and what they can do with it. For instance, our colour vision is good enough to see into the near infrared, and we can see some of the differences between different wavelengths. Some animals meanwhile can’t even see a difference between two colours that aren’t exactly the same wavelength. With this, you can easily decide how the aliens actually view the world. Do they see red and green as completely different, like we see blue and red? Or do they see red and green as the same colour, like we’d see black and dark grey? You can decide what colours they see in nature, and what effect that would have on their art and symbolism. Do they see red and orange as a prestigious colour, like humans do, or do they see them as nasty and grotesque? Maybe they have a spectrum with lots of cool, calming colours, so they build their cities out of blues and greens. You can decide if the colours of their spectrum differ from ours, if they have different wavelengths, or if they can see the same range of wavelengths as us but with more colour receptors. There’s a lot of depth you can go into, so you can make something really unique. <br><br>The lazy method of just slapping on our colour vision and making a few changes is not that interesting. It’s like making your aliens look like humans but just with a few extra features. It’s lazy and isn’t very creative. If you want to create an interesting setting, you should put a bit more effort into making your alien species unique, just like you would make their language, architecture, culture, technology and everything else unique.