🏳️🌈⚙️ The Color Coding System
0 🤖 Header
1 🦧 Primary
1 ⑦ The "Seven Colors"
1 🎬 Introduction
- The system started out with just the 7 primary colors.
- The intent was to develop a color coding system for the 7 days of the week.
- But then it turned into much more than that.
- But let's start out with the simple stuff.
2 🎹 The Keyboard
- We're starting out with the "keyboard" for the 7 primary colors.
- The keyboard exists for small 2 x 2 inch and large 3 x 3 inch Post It notes.
- The keyboard for 2 x 2 inch notes looks like this:
- And this is the equivalent for 3 x 3 inch notes:
- And this is both of them together:
3 🗓️ The Calendar
- Now, we'll have to take a look at the calendar. Because that's what inspired the whole thing.
- I hand-drew and colored the following calendars while I was at an inpatient psychiatric facility. This was one way how I knew how to fill my excessive free time.
- The calendars for this month and the subsequent 4 months look like this:
- I know, pretty, right?
- Here's a digital rendition of the one for June 2025.
2 🦄 The Chosen Colors
0 🎬 Introduction
- Alright, let's talk about the 7 chosen colors. What are they? Where did they come from? Why those?
- Well, we want things to be easy. And we want to create stuff that Autistic people like. And as we all know, Autistic people like rainbows. So we need rainbow colors.
- But not just any rainbow colors. We need to use the colors in the sequence in which they occur in the electromagnetic spectrum.
1 ⚡️ The Electromagnetic Spectrum
- Continuing on 2025-06-07.
- The electromagnetic (EM) spectrum looks like this:
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/radiation-health/about/electromagnetic-spectrum.html
- Now, that one is ordered by wavelength. Wavelength is antiproportial to energy and frequency. So this diagram shows lower energy to the right and higher energy to the left. Higher energy means higher frequency, but lower wavelength. You can see how the waveform is more squished to the left.
- If we sort by energy, the EM spectrum looks like this:
Source: https://sciencenotes.org/electromagnetic-spectrum-definition-and-explanation/
- In the middle of the EM spectrum is the visible spectrum. And that's all we're concerned with here. In essence, visible light is no different than x-rays, microwaves, or radio waves. The only difference is the frequency and with that the wavelength of the wave.
- What you'll recognize in the visible part of the spectrum is the rainbow in its correctly ordered sequence, which is as follows:
- 🟣 Purple
- 🔵 Blue
- 🟢 Green
- 🟡 Yellow
- 🟠 Orange
- 🔴 Red
- And depending on our use case, we could go forward or backward. It doesn't really matter. As long as we're preserving the sequence and don't think red belongs between green and blue like some manufacturers of multi-colored products. Don't ask me...
- The problem is that that's only 6 colors. We'll need a 7th color. And what would we possibly do without the color pink? Pink needs to be part of the game, otherwise we're missing the core essence of it.
2 🩷 The Story of Pink
1 🎬 Introduction
- Now, of course it's weird that the headline of the Story of Pink is actually purple, but that's just how this color theme works out. Because the colors of the headings are as follows:
Heading 1: Pink
Heading 2: Purple
Heading 3: Blue
Heading 4: Green
Heading 5: Yellow
Heading 6: Orange
- And we can't use the first 3 because otherwise section folding doesn't work properly.
- And we can't continue the list numbering with 2 and have to restart with 1 for complicated reasons. Anyway...
2 🤖➕ More Than Headings
- If you think that that looks all over the place because it's not properly centered, I agree. But that's the challenge with a monospaced font at different font sizes. We just have to deal with it.
- But that's not the point of this section. The point was to show you more of the color theme. Because it's not just the headings. We also have the following elements:
- That's all we need for now. It's pretty colorful. That's why I call it Guacamayo. Like a Macaw parrot.
3 ⏮️🩷 Back to Pink
- This was supposed to be the story of 🩷 Pink. How do we bring 🦩 Pink into the mix when we want to keep things consistent with a 🌈 rainbow?
- I mean, even the rainbow flag 🏳️🌈 doesn't have pink in it. But it has the colors in the correct sequence, so that's nice.
- Anyway, we need 🌸 Pink. And in EmoJus 🖤🧃 aka emo 🖤 juice 🧃 aka emoji sign language... we have plenty of options for 💅🏿 Pink. It's nice.
- But how do we implement 🎀 Pink into the rainbow 🌈? Easy! We just use a color wheel instead of just the rainbow.
- What is a color wheel and what does it look like? I'm glad you asked! Let's say the Story of Pink ends here. Because the rest will be implied once you understand the color wheel.
3 🎨🛞 The Color Wheel
0 🎬 Introduction
- Did you notice how we went one layer up in the heading structure again?
- We're now in Section 2.3. Section 2 is "The Chosen Colors". Subsection 3 is "The Color Wheel".
- We could also say that we're in Section 🦄.🎨🛞. Chosen colors dot color wheel. We could technically abbreviate 🎨🛞 to just 🛞 because it is clear that we're talking about colors, but it's sometimes better to be explicit.
- We could also say 🦄🎨.🎨🛞. Chosen Color dot Color Wheel. You get the idea.
1 🖤🧃➕ More EmoJus
- But in retrospect, I now got distracted again and should call this subsubsection Introduction. Because I didn't actually talk about the Color Wheel and instead gave you an introduction to EmoJus 🖤🧃 or even shorter, just 🖤.
- The black heart comes up as the first emoji suggestion when your keyboard is set to English and you type "emo" into the emoji search bar.
- The juice box is the second suggestion when you type "jui" into the search bar. Because only the soda cup and the juice box have "jui" in the keywords these emoji characters are tagged with.
- We could say that you can reach 🖤 via "EMO+1" and 🧃 via "JUI+2". The required search term and then the number of the available suggestions. These two are quick to access with only 3 letters and 1 number. That's nice.
2 🛞✴️ The Actual Color Wheel
- OK, back to the color wheel. What is it? What does it look like?
- It's a tool. And it contains lots of colors. And they are arranged in a circle. It looks like this:
- The color wheel is mostly used to teach color theory, to find complimentary colors, etc. But we can use it in a simpler fashion.
- You'll notice (if you are able to perceive color) that all the rainbow colors are part of the color wheel, but that pink shades are also part of it.
- What happens is that pink provides a bridge between purple and red. We already know that red and blue together make purple when we're working with ink, but in the EM spectrum, purple comes before blue.
- But, we can use the color wheel to bring things full circle. So pink creates the connective tissue between red, the longest wavelength color of the EM spectrum, and purple, the lowest wavelength color of the EM spectrum.
4 🔄🦄🎨 Updated Chosen Colors
0 🎬 Introduction
- So, now that we have 🩷 Pink in the mix, we can update our color sequence from before and add 🩷 Pink to it.
- The updated color list looks as follows:
- 🟣 Purple
- 🔵 Blue
- 🟢 Green
- 🟡 Yellow
- 🟠 Orange
- 🔴 Red
- 🩷 Pink
- Now, we could add 🩷 Pink at the beginning as well and it would create good flow. And then we can cycle through the list and set the starting point wherever we like. For example, it could go like this:
- 🟡 Yellow
- 🟠 Orange
- 🔴 Red
- 🩷 Pink
- 🟣 Purple
- 🔵 Blue
- 🟢 Green
- See how it works and how this brings us full circle?
1 💔 The Story of the Heart
- Now, one may have noticed that 🩷 Pink is notated with a Pink heart rather than a Pink circle. Why is that?
- That's because the emoji makers decided that Pink doesn't need a colored circle. But luckily we have the heart available.
- You can try it yourself. Go to the emoji search and search for "blue circle", "green circle", etc. and note what happens when you search for "pink circle". Exactly.
- All we get is this: 🟣🔵🟢🟡🟠🔴🩷
- Now, of course, we could do everything with hearts, right? Well... That's what I thought, but then we run into another problem. Watch!
- Hearts for all the colors: 💜💙💚💛🧡❤️🩷
- See the problem? Obsidian doesn't want to render the red heart in the color red and instead uses an ugly ASCII or Unicode character that looks nothing like an emoji character and has the color of this font. That's meh.
- You may have noticed if you tried to type this yourself that for most colors, the individual heart in that color shows up first in the suggestions once the color name is fully typed, but that behavior is also not consistent. I don't know if Apple is to blame for that or the Unicode Consortium. It's one or the other or both. It's meh.
- Bottom line: If we want to use all heart notation, we have to use the broken heart instead of the solid red heart. And if we want to do all circles, then Pink will stand out with a heart. But I don't mind that. It's just about getting used to either or both. So here it is again:
- 🟣🔵🟢🟡🟠🔴🩷 or 💜💙💚💛🧡💔🩷
5 🏁 The Final Chosen Colors
- Now, we've basically settled on the seven colors we need. Again, they are the following colors:
- 🟣 Purple
- 🔵 Blue
- 🟢 Green
- 🟡 Yellow
- 🟠 Orange
- 🔴 Red
- 🩷 Pink
- That's it. We now have 7 colors that work in a circular fashion. Each color is distinctly different from the other ones. There should never be confusion about whether something is a neighboring color. It's simple, straight forward, and should easy to use for anyone who is not color-blind.
3 🦄🗓️ The Chosen Colors & The Calendar
1 🗺️ Weekday Mapping
- Now we can take our 7 colors and we can map them onto the 7 weekdays. In other words, we assign a color to each day of the week.
- Remember what the calendar for this month looks like? This is how I drew it:
- Now, how do we assign the colors in a way that they make sense? There are lots of considerations.
1 🖍️💭 Color Considerations
- First, we need to remember that Monday is blue. Because that's what The Cure taught us and we all know. "I don't care if Monday's blue". See here: https://youtu.be/mGgMZpGYiy8 or here: https://genius.com/The-cure-friday-im-in-love-lyrics
- So that one is a given. Monday is blue. Can't do anything about it. Nor do we need or want to. So, we have:
- 🔵 Day 1 – Monday
- Then we have to consider that we have a dilemma with the numbers of weekdays. Because somehow, the United States think(s) that the week starts with the second half of the weekEND.
- A week starting on a Sunday just makes no sense to me. Sunday is Day 7. Period. But some people prefer to look at the calendar with Sunday being at the beginning of the week rather than at the end where it belongs. It's weird. We'll come back to this. There's a solution.
- Next, if we think more about The Cure... we'll remember that "Friday I'm in Love". And love is red. So Friday needs to be red. That's our second anchor point. That gives us:
- 🔴 Day 5 – Friday
- And the rest just falls into place when we consider what colors we have left and in what sequence. So, it goes as follows:
- 🔵 Day 1 – Monday
- 🟢 Day 2 – Tuesday
- 🟡 Day 3 – Wednesday
- 🟠 Day 4 – Thursday
- 🔴 Day 5 – Friday
2 🗓️🏁 The Weekend
- Now, we've assigned colors to the weekdays. That's what you'll find for most color coding systems. 5 colors. If you're lucky, it'll have 6, but sometimes 4 and never 7.
- Even the meal prep kit from Target only has 5 colors for the food containers. Because on Saturday and Sunday, mom cooks at home, right? Autistic Adults ( #AA-Autistic-Adults ), who wish to streamline their meal prep for all 7 days of the week are definitely not The Target's Audience ( #TA-Target-Audience ).
- Now, what do we do about Saturday and Sunday in our color coding system? Well, Saturday is a pretty special day as well. Almost as fun as Friday if not more. So something close to red maybe?
- Well, we have pink to build the bridge from Red to Purple back to Blue. So that makes things easy:
- 🩷 Day 6 – Saturday
- 🟣 Day 7 – Sunday
- Now, the observant observer will have noticed that with the roll-over system and it all coming full circle, it now doesn't matter if we place Sunday at the beginning or the end of the week. The color sequence flow just works. Because check it out:
3 🏁🗓️🌅🗺️ Final Weekday Mapping
- Option 1:
- 🔵 Day 1 – Monday
- 🟢 Day 2 – Tuesday
- 🟡 Day 3 – Wednesday
- 🟠 Day 4 – Thursday
- 🔴 Day 5 – Friday
- 🩷 Day 6 – Saturday
- 🟣 Day 7 – Sunday
- Option 2:
- 🟣 Day 7 – Sunday
- 🔵 Day 1 – Monday
- 🟢 Day 2 – Tuesday
- 🟡 Day 3 – Wednesday
- 🟠 Day 4 – Thursday
- 🔴 Day 5 – Friday
- 🩷 Day 6 – Saturday
- See? The colors work, the numbers don't. But it doesn't matter. We all know that Sunday is Day 7. If not, it's time to learn that.
- How we look at things is arbitrary. As long as the system makes sense. And this makes sense to me. So there's that.
2 ⏰📷 Timestamp Photos
- Now, let me show you how to create an environment in which you can quickly and easily take a photo with a timestamp. This will become very helpful later. It will look like this:
- You will need a standard wall clock and a bunch of pre-written 3 x 3 inch Post-It notes. I recommend creating the following stock as a starting point:
- 3x each: 🔵 D1 Monday, 🟢 D2 Tuesday, etc.
- 4x each: 🔵 1, 🟢 2, 🟡 3, ..., 🐳 8, 🌿 9, 🔘 0
- 1x 🟢 "Y2025 Snake" [or whatever year it is.]
- 1x 🩷 "M06 June" [or whatever month it is.]
- 1x 🔴 XXX [Your airport code.]
- 1x 🟢 AM, 1x 🟠 PM
- I know, the AM/PM is funny. But somehow nobody has invented a wall clock yet that shows 24 hour time and was mass-adopted. Don't ask me why...
- Now, all you need to do is place the year, month, date, AM/PM indicator, and location indicator around your clock. Add a Post-It note with the color of the day and write the full day in ISO format. YYYY-MM-DD. Because it makes sense that way. I'm not explaining that.
3 ✅ That's it.
- That's it. Now you have a color coded calendar and a way to take timestamp photos. Easy.
- I keep my supply on the inside of my kitchen cabinet doors. It looks like this:
4 🎛️ The Kanban Board
- We'll get to this section some other time. It's about task and project management. Of your personal and work life.